hello my sweeties!! a lot of people have been asking for some help with creating nice looking colorings, so i want to share some basic help today! :3
the thing i value the most in a psd coloring is versatility. which means, i like making sure that my colorings work on almost any shade of color, even on colors that are different from the ones i used for my test image! i usually make psd colorings that only use two colors, so this tutorial will work best for colorings like that, though it can also be used for colorings that use three colors :D
now, you can just imagine this… you find a really pretty psd coloring and think 'wow! this looks amazing, i HAVE to use this for my next edit!' but then you apply it to your image, and it just looks… weird. let me show you an example :D my test subject for today's tutorial will be yotsuba, using a simple psd coloring with only four layers.
what you can notice here, is that the middle image has a nice contrast between the orange and the green, but the other two images have this really nasty yellow-ish green, that just doesn't harmonize well with the orange of yotsuba's hair.
how can you fix this? well, with a simple hue/saturation layer! you can find this tool under the adjustment layers section, and should look like this.
as you can see, you can choose to adjust multiple colors, and with the eyedropper tool selected, you can choose the color range. you can also just use the slider instead, too.
we want to make our green less lime-y, so let's do that!
now we fixed the issue of the green tone looking weird, but there's another issue! namely, the images are too saturated, making it kind of hard to look at.
you can fix this issue either with the hue/saturation layer again, but here you can also use the selective color layer! the tool can also be found in the adjustment layer section.
again, you can choose which specific color to adjust, but this time you have four sliders to use. these sliders adjust how much of a shade the color you adjust has. the higher or lower the percentage is, the more or less of that specific shade will be in the color!
for example, if you put more magenta in your red, then the red will appear more pink, and if you put more yellow, then your red will look more orange. the black slider basically decides how saturated your color will be. it's kind of hard to explain, so please just try this out for yourself.
there, now the image is a little less painful to look at. however, the colors still don't look very pleasant... for me specifically, the purples bother me, so i will get rid of them using the selective color tool and the hue/saturation tool.
finally, i'm going to use a gradient map layer to bring the yellow a bit down, as well as change the red to be more orange.
this is your result! if you compare that to how it first started out, the coloring looks a lot nicer already, with only three extra layers, bringing it to a total of seven layers.
now, the coloring will work well on images with a orange and green color scheme will look great, but if you were to use this on an image with, let's say, a more cyan color scheme, well...
it would look as if almost nothing had changed TT but fret not! just use the selective color and the hue/saturation layer to its maximum potential, by adjusting the cyan to become more green, and...
the coloring will even work on images that are more cyan! :]
effectively keeping track of how your coloring looks on different colors is the most important thing to make sure your coloring will be versatile. to do this, you can simply use color swatches! i suggest checking out @aescola 's post, as the swatches provide a broad spectrum of colors. here is how our current psd coloring would look on the swatch.
well, considering that the coloring is supposed to be a two color combo, it still doesn't work well on certain shades, and just doesn't look the way it should on nearly enough colors. so, if you see your color swatch look like this, then that's your cue to use even more adjustment layers! add another hue/saturation layer, and...
...if your coloring ends up looking something like this, then congrats! you can now make colorings that will work well on most images with differing color schemes! :]
well, i have reached my image limit, so that will be it for today's tutorial! i hope you could learn something from today's lesson, and if you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an ask~
