#psd tutorial

I. Important Keywords

※ PSD stands for Photoshop Document. It is a type of file that saves all the layers of what you are working on so you can open it later. In this case, people make a bunch of color filters and save them as a PSD so others can download and use those color filters.

※ POC, People/Person of Color, in this case refers to characters/people that are not completely white and contain at least an ounce of Melanin.

II. Starting

First, let's get a showcase to test our PSD on. I and others commonly use the one below, made by @/amemcth, as it includes characters of various media. You can refer to their post for more versions.

You may also make one of your own, as long as it contains POC. It important to note that you do not use sprite edits.

Testing your progress on swatches is also important. Here's a swatch down below, it's best you keep another one side-by-side above the PSD folder so you can check what your PSD does

III. What is the Problem?

Here, I have put a two PSDs on the showcase. I need you to take a good look at them and point out the difference, and which one isn't POC friendly.

If you haven't figured it out by now, the first one isn't POC-friendly.

Why? The first one lightens the red far too much. An important tip is that you never saturate the red too much, or make it too light. It gets rid of the brown tones of skin.

How do we fix this? Let's make a new Hue/Saturation layer. You will now see 3 sliders on your screen. Get the 'lightness' slider and reduce it until it seems okay.

If your reds are too BRIGHT/saturated, then get the 'saturation' slider and reduce that, too. If your reds are too ASHY/desaturated, (basically looks too grey) than increase the saturation.

This is what I could salvage of the PSD, using our Hue/Saturation layer. You can also use Selective Color, tick the 'absolute' box, select red, and increase the 'black' slider. But it won't fix the saturation, so it's better you either use both Selective Color & Hue/Sat in pairs, or just Hue/Sat.

Now, Let's take a look at another PSD below.

The problem here, obviously, is that it makes skintones green. ANYTHING that makes skintones a color that is NOT red-brown, is not POC friendly.

How do we fix this? It's better you go through your layers and check which one does this, though it's very likely a Hue/Saturation layer. There's two solutions:

Delete that layer

Adjust that layer by the 'hue' slider, increase or decrease the slider until the skintones are red again.

And thus, we have now fixed the problem.

This problem is very common in PSDs, and I want to make something very important clear:

PSDs changing red to pink or purple are also not POC friendly.

And now, our final problem.

The issue here, is that everything's too bright. This is mostly caused by the following layers: Exposure, Brightness/Contrast, Levels & Curves.

To fix this, we find the layer causing this problem and adjust it accordingly. Or, we delete it.

Another solution, is that we get a Hue/Sat layer, set it to red, and tone the lightness down. This is if you really want to keep the brightness of the PSD without it completely butchering skintones. You can also get a Selective Color layer, tick the 'absolute button', select red, and increase the 'black' slider. I recommend you just delete the layer though, personally.

IV. Other Mistakes

※ Excessive Threshold: When you use too much threshold in your PSDs. This is when you set the slider too high and it makes darker skintones completely pitch-black. To fix this, you set the threshold low enough until on the showcase, not a single character's skin is black.

In some cases, you just can't make it POC friendly no matter how hard you try the methods above. That's okay, you just restart the PSD-making process from scratch. Nothing is too much to ensure your PSDs are accessible and POC-friendly.

If you don't want to change your PSD that much, you can always create an optional POC folder inside that contains adjustments to turn it skintone friendly, when toggled on.

Again, please inform me if there were any mistakes made in here. I am open to suggestions and critique as long as it isn't abrupt harassment, and I am open to learning more and improving this guide as best as I can. I honestly get really upset when I see that there are lots of non-POC-friendly PSDs in this community, and figured I'd take action as we as a whole, genuinely need to become more inclusive with our PSDs.

Thank you for reading! I appreciate it a ton!

Hello guys! Today ill make a tutorial on how to use psds! Dont be scared, its really easy and very fun too!

First, open photopea with the image you wanna use. click “File” and press open, after that, you open your files and select your psd!

Great! Now we have the psd! But what do we do with it…?

well, first you need to check that youre on the right layer: Make sure youre selecting your psd folder before doing anything here!

great! Now click “layer” and after that, “duplicate into”

Now make sure you change it to the name of the project you wanna apply the psd to!

Enjoy your edits!

Feel free to send in an ask if you have any questions or something wasnt clear enough! Im always happy to help. See ya!

start off with a base image to work with. i personally like to work with at least 4 images and a color swatch, like this. (link, i made this).

for psd making in general, i suggest using images with a variety of color and good lighting. i personally like using images from different franchises so i know how it looks on different styles, but you can do whatever you want.

of course, if you want to make something like a blue psd, use a collection of MOSTLY blue images so you know what it looks on both blue and non-blue images. if you want to make a miku psd, use mostly miku images and maybe one non-miku character so you can see how usable it is on other things.

cards with intense environmental lighting (like this one) are harder to test on. monochrome images only give you an idea of how one color would look.

above is the first step most editors go with for making psds, after this, it's mostly personal taste.

2. highlight the colors you want

highlighting: here, i want to make a cyan psd so i highlight cyans. this can be accomplished by increasing vibrancy using a vibrance layer, using selective color (increasing cyan in cyan and getting rid of magenta/yellow, doing the same for blue and green as they both easily create cyan).

i also want the psd to be cyan AND red so i make sure the red in makoto's jacket is highlighted. this is done via selective color and taking the cyan out of red. (cyan and red are opposites, mixing the two made the coat muddled, taking out the cyan makes it more vividly red).

3. fucking around.

i'm so serious when i say there is no concrete process of psd making. it's all up to personal taste but there are two guidelines you should follow: don't whitewash (or make skintones unrecognizable) and make sure there are contrast between your colors so it isn't eyestraining.

whitewashing can be prevented by making sure that the red and yellow values aren't subtracted entirely. if a skintone is too vibrant, add cyan back into red. if it's too orange or yellow, add magenta and cyan to yellow and take out some yellow but not all.

contrast can be created by using a vibrance layer to add vibrancy, or using selective color to take out a color's opposite color (ex: take cyan out of red and yellow, take magenta out of cyan and green, yellow out of magenta, etc etc.) alternatively, you can apply the opposite color theory with a photo filter layer as well, but it will affect other colors.

3. actually fucking around.

"hey didn't you want to make a cyan psd" well i fucked around to the green dimension. i liked how the orange photo filter made the cyan green, so i decided to ride with it and decide to keep emphasizing the green and made it more teal. green and magenta go together well, so the combo went from cyan and red to green and magenta. this works as the colors changed to something similar. i then try to fix contrast and the skintones.

"hey, weren't you just talking about green and magenta" FUCK IT. we move back to cyan to make the colors crazier (within reason). while trying to make makoto less blonde, i decided to increase the contrast by using a black and white gradient map. i try to not use gradient maps a lot as they tend to mess up colors a lot. i apply basic color theory to make the green cyan, and then change the magenta to orange to both fix the skintones and to make a nice color combo.

i decide that this is a good place to stop, and that i like how this looks on other images. the final step would be to save this psd onto a smaller canvas to save space!

4. conclusion

and there concludes the process of making this tutorial psd. i again encourage you to download the psd to go through each layer and understand what was happening here. i apologize if this tutorial wasn't clear! i really just wanted to emphasize that the process is literally just adding adjustment layers until you're satisfied and that it fits the two guidelines of not whitewashing (within reason) and having contrast!

a useful setting would be Selective Color ( i apologize if the name is wrong, i have my photopea in spanish and have to translate everything myself 😓😓)

for example, the PSDs i used here barely have any layers, but i used a ton of selective color layers!

basically, from my own experience, i'll say Selective color is to make a specific color kinda .....pop (?. idk how to explain it.

moving on, i also recommend threshold! idk how to explain this one, so i'll just leave an example!

I exagerated it a little to show the effect properly lol, you can adjust it to as little or as much as you want! just remember to set the layer to multiply! (or any blending mode that works for you! many of them work, i just use multiply for... no reason at all actually)

next up, we have Replace Color!

it literally just... replaces colors. most people use it on black! just add the effect, set the color to the one you wish to replace, and start playing with the settings!

-- also, note that when using it on black, you have to turn up the luminosity for it to work!

last but not least, Color Intensity!

its just... color intensity. but yeah! its pretty useful! i'll leave 2 examples here.

If anyone has any other tips, feel free to reblog! i kind of learned everything by myself, so im not the best, sorry.

i'll confess i haven't seen it myself, but @/canarysage has a psd tutorial here! so... just saying, you should check that out!

(user canarysage feel free to throw tomatoes at me and boo me off the stage (in other words, feel free to send an ask to be removed!))

One thing I'd like to say that there isn't a easier or proper way to make a psd... Everyone has their own type of style of making so this is more of a tutorial on how stupid me makes a psd

Also one thing I'd also like to mention that this tutorial is probably very shitty cuz most of the idk what the fuck I'm doing 😭😭😭 so I'd recommend these also

Canarysages tutorial

Imbermagnvs tutorial

Nyotsubas tutorial

Myuumeis tutorial

This carrd made by my twin kuu !!

Well first you need a showcase... For this one I didn't really make one but and you don't actually need one just a png of the character works just fine

One thing that is genuinely my best friend when I'm making a psd is swatchies LOVE THESE SM and lowk my mentality is that if it looks good on the swatchies then it's a good psd HEL.. that's not always the case but I do want them to look pretty tho ://

First it always starts with Gradient map (b&w) reversed then 30% opacify and soft light setting it makes colors look more vibrant which it makes it easier to change them

I follow that up with either 1 or 2 selective color layers I tend to make mine really harsh.. cuz I mostly use swatchies are my reference

This is two

Btw this for every color both times yes this is important remember to do that and not make separate layers for each color... Like how I did

Then I do hue saturation then also every color range and woah how did I do that white thingy for the swatchies...

Well the reason why I make my selective color harsh I would say is so it's easier to well change a certain shade however I want it's why the magenta is so harsh

ONE THING ID LIKE TO MENTION : do NOT get rid of red unless you want ur sillies to look like aliens, you can get rid of yellow but red you cannot yes you can make it more purple but you cannot replace it with a cool color cuz then ur silly will look like a creature

IK THAT YOU TECHNICALLY MAKE THE RANGE BIGGER BUT SOMETIMES THAT CAN FUCK THINGS UP...

After that is color balance which I just mess around with until I get something i like

THEN IMPORTANT THINGY!! THE CHANNEL MIXER !! this can VERY change a color but remember for each it has to sum up to 100

Examples here

I don't always do this but it's fun to mess around with

Then there's a b&w layer on lighten on 30% makes things lighter yaya !!

curves ! These are important id say mine end up looking like this and it leads to this really cool effect

After that I try to make the red more lively cuz it is kinda sad and the cyan bluer and darker (red done via selective color and cyan done via hue saturation) awwhh look so cute

Next is this thingy that I was introduced to me by @/canarysage, noise gradient -> soft light -> 30% opacity

I just randomize until I get something i like

AND THATS THE PSD YAYA!!! Here's a showcase how silly also here's the link to it if you wanna review and dissect yourself !

The screenshot below shows:

Text Settings

Color Lookup Settings

Base Settings

Optional Settings

More Text settings:

Stroke

Drop Shadow

Save settings:

Other Settings:

Gif speed: 0.03 (Usually 0.06 but Golden Girls is better at 0.03)

Sharpening (I made an 'action' for it but here's the settings):