Changing Specific Colours MINI TUTORIAL

Open the 2 images (The image that you want to change color in and the image of the target color that you want to achieve)

Do a selection of the part/s of the cloth on the image you want to change, I used the pen tool for all my selections.
I put a feather radius of 1 pixel to the selection.

Now you have only 2 options to colorise the cloth of the model.
1:Hue/Saturation.
2:Match color.
You can try either method here; sometimes one will give a better result than the other, depending on the image.


With your selection active click on the hue/saturation adjustment layer in the layers panel.

Now that you have the hue/saturation dialog box active, try adjusting the sliders until you achieve the color that you are looking for.

Here is my image before and after using Hue/Saturation:

Match Color:
Do a selection of the highlights,midtones and shadows on the reference image.

duplicate the background layer of your image,load the selection with the feather then go to image>adjustment>match color.

Make sure that `use selection in source to calculate colors` and use selection in target to calculate adjustment` is ticked.Select your reference image as source.

Finally you add an S curve to the selection then sets its blend mode to luminosity.

You can go even further to get the color as close as the reference by using curves on either the Hue/saturation method, or the match color method.

Hopefully, I've given you an idea of the basic techniques required when altering color values within your image.

Normally after that stage I compare the midtones, highlights and shadow values for both images. With practice, the technique becomes easier!

Here are the results of my final image using hue/saturation and match color:

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Kawaii! A Manga Tutorial AVTAAR MAKING IN PHOTO SHOP PART 3

STEP 12
I could stop here with metamorphosis, butI thought I'd give her kitty ears. :D
So I found a suitable source, used a mask to cut the ears out. I don't bother keeping fur when masking, I just add it later. There are a couple of excellent tutorials on fur on Worth, so I won't go into detail here, I'll just say that I used a combination of Smudge Tool and painting, both with a hair brush.
Now, that her ears are nice and fluffy, I need to adjust the colour. Exposure make the ears nice and bright, Color Balance (Normal blending mode) took care of general colouring. I didn't like the colour of the skin inside the ears, so I used Levels, Screen mode to lighten it up, and make it soft pink. Finally, I painted some colour variations on a separate Color layer with a hair brush.

STEP 13
Accessorizing - YAY! :D I decided to go with some face and hair decorations. I used a bunch of rhinestones for the face and plastic flowers for the hair. Of course, they need some shading, slightly increased Exposure, and glow on a separate layer. I also added a little colour to her eyebrows and eyelashes to match the hair (Color layer). And, of course, I couldn't resist the urge to sprinkle some glitter around the eyes and on the lips. ;)

STEP 14
Almost done. Some final tweaks left.
Use Levels to darken her right human ear, so it's not visible.
Her left eyebrow has a weird angular shadow closer to the nose bridge, so I used Levels and a tiny (about 2 px) brush, pressure opacity, to lighten the area and fix that.
And shrink her left shoulder to make the body look much smaller.

STEP 15
Finally, I want to enhance her eyes, lips and hair. Make a stamp layer, then go to Filter - Other - High Pass, choose a low value, just when you can see fine embossed lines. Turn the High Pass layer to Vivid Light, decrease opacity to about 75%. Add mask to hide all, paint to reveal the eyes and lips, sparingly reveal some hair.
All done! :)

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Kawaii! A Manga Tutorial AVTAAR MAKING IN PHOTO SHOP PART 2

And now we have to fix the neck. Again, duplicate the affected area from the stamp layer, use Distort to match the edges. Blend.

Finally, make another stamp layer, then soften the angles of the chin, and make the mouth a little more pouty with Liquify.

STEP 7
Now I don't really like those deep shadows under her eyes and on the side of the nose, so I'm going to lighten them with Levels, Lighten blending mode. I use a tiny brush (2-3px) to carefully lighten the pixels while zoomed in extremely.

STEP 8
Next, I want to give her shiny lips.
Create a Curves layer, Screen blending mode, and paint glitter with a scattered brush of your choice, then paint gloss with a plain semi-transparent brush.
Next, duplicate the latest stamp layer, apply lower value Surface Blur, and desaturate the layer. Apply Plastic Wrap (Filters - Artistic). Play with the sliders until wet look is achieved. Change the blending mode of the layer to Vivid Light, reduce the opacity to your liking. Make a Hide All layer mask, and reveal the lips.

STEP 9
Let's enhance the eyes.
I usually start with Exposure adjustment layer (irises only, naturally, so use a mask), Overlay blending mode. Then I add Color Balance (as a clipping mask), Color blending mode. And to top it off, let's add some flecks with opaque white brush on a new layer, Overlay mode.

STEP 10
Time to paint some colourful make-up on a new Color layer.

STEP 11
And now we're going to change hair colour to something more interesting than black. ;)
First, I painted new colour on a Color layer, added colour variations for shadows and highlights.

Looks a bit dull, so I enhanced the highlights with a Levels layer, and to spice it up I added some really bright tiny highlights for that "wispy" look.

To achieve that, I created a new Screen layer, with 75% opacity, then painted with a brush with following settings: spacing 60%, Size Jitter 100%, Pen Pressure. Add Outer Glow to the layer, my settings were: Opacity 75%, colour white, Size 5 px, Spread 0%, Range 31%, Anti-aliased.

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Kawaii! A Manga Tutorial AVTAAR MAKING IN PHOTO SHOP PART 1

This is a tutorial on how I turned delightful Christina Ricci into an anime-style character for my entry Kawaii!.

STEP 1
The first thing to do is to find a high-res image. The larger, the better. I like mine to be over 2272x1704.

STEP 2
Duplicate your source, and shrink it, that'll be the base for the image. Do not discard the original as we'll be cutting out bits and pieces out of it in the next steps.

STEP 3
Now cut the eyes from the original and place them on the smaller image, adjust the positioning. I usually drop the opacity of the eyes layer and join the inner eye corners together. Blend the eyes well. I use a speckled brush with opacity set to pressure, then apply a lower value Gaussian Blur. It can take a lot of time, so you'd better stock up on patience. ;)

Looks like I lost a part of her eyebrow due to the size difference. ;) So I'll just copy that part from the original, scale it down and blend it, change the layer blending mode to Darken.

STEP 4
Next, duplicate the nose area and shrink it. Place this layer under the eyes layer and adjust the positioning - I usually use the philtrum for guides. Because of the new size, the nose has to be rotated clockwise just a little (for this particular image), which caused the nostrils to look a bit uneven. I used Liquify to correct that.

STEP 5
Time to adjust the chin.
First, duplicate the lower part of the face with the neck and move it up.
Second, duplicate the base image (from Step 2) and use Liquify on the cheekbones to fit the layer with the chin.
Third, duplicate the mouth area, scale it down and blend all the layers together.

STEP 6
Now, her face looks too wide, we need to address that.
Make a stamp layer (Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E).
Duplicate the left side of her face and chin and move it to the right and slightly up. Blend.

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Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass PART-4

Now I create a new layer above the sand and selected a grayish purple color to match the shadows in the sand. I added a clipping mask, set the layer to multiply and painted in the shadow. After I was done I thought about it, and decided that the bottle would allow some light through it so I went to hue/saturation and changed the color of my shadow to give a little greenish tone to it.

Now I want to put something in the bottle so let's add a message. I paste in the message source image on the top layer and lower it opacity so I can kind of see how it looks positioned in the bottle and if it will even work. I do this instead of masking it first so that I don't waste time in masking the image only to find that I don't like how it looks.

As luck would have it, the source is just what I want so I go ahead and mask it. (If you're curious to know what the message says, it reads "Help! I'm trapped on an island called Worthenesia and am being forced to write tutorials. The rum is running low-please rescue me!)

Now I just need to move the layer to the proper place which is down between the bottle layer set to multiply and the bottle layer set to screen. Think of the multiply layer as the back side of the glass and the screen layer as the front side of the glass. I burned some shadows onto the note and gave it a greenish tone by going to Image-adjustments-photo filter-underwater just as I'd done earlier.

Stick a cork in it I'm done. The last step was to add the cork and I did all the same tricks I did to it as the scroll-sandwiched it between the bottle layers and applied the underwater filter to the part of the cork that was inside the bottle and burned in the shading. A few tweaks to the contrast of the main background and then on the bottle shaped, distorted background copy- I went to brightness/contrast and dropped the brightness 15 points and added 15 to the contrast.

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Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass PART-3

I'm now adding a little shape to the bottle by creating a new layer set to multiply and using a brown (basically a darker tone of the sand) and painting in some shading. I've made a clipping mask so that the brown doesn't go outside the shape of the bottle (For more on clipping masks, see Shorra's tutorial on the subject)

Now I'm going to turn on the layer which is the copy of the bottle and set its blending mode to Screen which causes it to be slightly transparent. As a mnemonic device, I like to think about the multiply and screen modes as yin and yan. Multiply basically drops out all white out of your image while Screen drops out all black (the yin and yan symbol is those black and white intertwined teardrop looking thingies)

Note: You could also try setting the blend mode to Overlay instead of Screen. It gives a little more transparent look but since I want a good bit of glare, Screen works better here. If you were doing say a fishbowl sitting on a counter, Overlay may suit you better.

Next create a layer mask for this layer and with the mask active, select all and fill with black. This has now entirely masked out the bottle. Then set your color to white and with a soft brush at a low opacity, start adding or "painting" back in some of the bottle. You'll want to think where the light would be hitting it. I vary the opacity of my brush with higher opacities where the light is hitting the bottle the strongest and low opacities where I just want a little light reflection-the image is how it looks when I'm done.

Now I want to add a bit of the bottle's tone to the image. If you look at the base of the original image of the bottle, it's got a bit of a green tone. So I select my background copy layer (the distorted beach in the shape of a bottle) and go to Image-Adjustmets-Photo Filter-Underwater which applies a bit of greenish tone (I'm showing you two screenshots side by side again-I don't have a special version of Photoshop)

Ok, that got me a little more green but I wasn't satisfied with the result. I created a new layer at the top-used the command+click trick in the layer icon of the bottle to get a selection in the shape of the bottle and filled it with a teal color. I then changed the layer mode to Soft Light and lowered the opacity down to 70%-now we're getting somewhere.

Ok, just a few more finishing touches on the glass. I created a layer for highlights and with the shape of the bottle selected once more, painted in a few more highlights with white-blending mode normal. On another layer I painted in a few shadows using a dark teal green and the layer mode set to multiply.

Now for a few final touches. The bottle looks to be just floating above the sand-I can't have that. I pasted a new layer at the top which was a closeup of some sand. I added a mask to the layer and masked out the sky. When masking things like sand or dirt, I like to use an irregular shaped brush like one of the native spatter brushes to give me an uneven edge.

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Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass PART-2

Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass PART-2

I've turned the bottle layer back on but I'm still working on the now distorted beach layer. I want this image to be a bit blurry and I want the more distant objects to be more blurry. So I first used the blur tool, grabbed a big soft brush and blurred the area above the sand dune. Then I apply a slight gaussian blur (Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur) to the whole layer.

Next we want to remove all of the distorted beach background except for the area defined by the bottle. With the distorted beach layer active, Command+click (Alt+click for you Windows users) in the little layer icon for the bottle. This will select all visible pixels in that layer-the shape of the bottle. Since the beach layer is the one that is active, however, changes will be to this layer in the shape of the bottle. Now go to Select-Inverse and delete and now the distorted beach layer is just the shape of the bottle.

Ok. Now I'm going to duplicate the layer that contains the bottle and hide the copy. I change the blending mode to Multiply.

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Message in a Bottle-Working with Glass

The first step-like with any entry is to gather your sources. Here are the ones I'll be using.

Next I opened the beach source. I then pasted the bottle on a layer above it. Since the background is white and the bottle has well defined edges, it was easy to create a layer mask for it using the magic wand tool (I wish it were always this easy). Once I had it masked, I applied and discarded the mask.

Since a clear object doesn't have much color of its own, it's really how it interacts with what you see through it that we will be modifying. It distorts and refracts that image. To that end, I'll be modifying the background beach scene. I've duplicated the background(beach) layer. (I've temporarily lowered the transparency of the bottle layer so I can see the background through it).Then with the beach layer active, I go to Filter-Distort-Spherize and set the value to negative to give a concave distortion. You can choose whatever value you deem appropriate. Closer objects would be less distorted and farther one maybe a bit more so since most of what is seen is pretty far away, I chose a larger number. Through the magic of Photoshop, I've pasted the result into the same window (with the bottle hidden)

Note: If you have trouble reading the settings in any of the screen shots, just click the images and they will enlarge.

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photo blending with layer masks to fix group photo issues in photoshop cs6

Any photographer who does team and individual photos will frequently run into a situation when some players in a team photo have their eyes closed.  While taking multiple photos usually prevents the need to do advanced editing in Photoshop, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.  Here is a simple way to use Layer Masks in Photoshop to solve this dilemma. The beauty of this technique is that it works great for any group photo including family and wedding photography.
This is a quick and easy tip that will work wonders for your photography.  We are going to combine two images using a layer mask and the Brush tool.  While we are using Photoshop CS6 in this tutorial most of the features are available in earlier versions of Photoshop.

A Few Pointers

I’ve mentioned this in previous articles but it’s worth repeating because it’s a huge time saver.  One of the best time saving tools in Photoshop is the use of keyboard shortcuts.  You can find a full list of the keyboard shortcuts available in Photoshop or use the keyboard shortcut “Alt+Shift+Ctrl+k” in Photoshop.  It is important to note that all of the keyboard shortcuts I reference here are for PC.  Rather than give you 2 options for every shortcut, just follow this rule:  if you are using a Mac, just swap “Control” for “Command” and “Alt” for “Option”.  As always, I recommend saving your work often.  Simply pressing “Control+S” after making changes will save you a lot of headache if Photoshop crashes.  If you do not have a powerful system this can happen from time to time.

Combining the Photos

We need to place the “eyes closed” image on top of the “eyes open” image as a new layer.  This can be done by simply dragging the layer from one image to the other.  However, if you use the Photoshop default that opens your documents as tabs, this isn’t as easy.  A quick trick on how to move a layer to another Photoshop document is to use the Duplicate Layer command.  To do this, click on the Layer drop down menu and select Duplicate Layer.  This will bring up the Duplicate Layer dialog box as seen in Figure 3.  In this case we want to change the destination to our other image.  Simply select that image in the drop down menu and click OK.

Duplicating The Layer To A New Document

Aligning the Layers

Now that we have our “eyes closed” image on top of the “eyes open” version, we need to align the layers so her eyes line up properly.  In some cases this can be done using the Align tool, but if the images were not taken at the identical focal length this may not work.  In this case it is easier to just do it manually by adjusting the opacity of the top layer.  With the top layer selected press “V” to select your direct selection tool.  Now press 5 to adjust the opacity to 50%.  You can do this manually by adjusting the opacity in the Layers Panel as well.  The result is going to look a little weird at first but use your arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge the top layer around until it lines up nicely over the person to whom you are making the changes.  As you can see in the photo below, the girl is lined up properly even though the rest of the team isn’t   Remember, we are only making changes to her so the rest of the team doesn’t matter here.  Now that they are aligned, press “0” to set the opacity back to 100%.

Aligning The Layers

Using Layer Masks

Layer Masks can be a little intimidating at first but once you get the hang of it you will wonder how you ever lived without it.  When we use a Layer Mask we are not changing the actual image, which is why it’s called “non-destructive editing”.  In this scenario, if you used the Eraser tool, we would be making permanent changes to the layer–we can avoid that by masking.  The most important thing to remember with masking is that white reveals and black conceals.  Before you add the layer mask you need to make sure that the layer you’re adding it to is selected in the Layers Panel.  The selected layer will be highlighted in blue.  Here I can see that my top layer is selected so I’m ready to add the mask to it.  In the Layers Panel, click the Create New Layer Mask icon as shown in the image below.

Create New Layer Mask

By default, layer masks are added as white, meaning whatever they are masking is 100% visible, so you won’t see a change in your image when you add the mask; however, you will see a white layer mask thumbnail next to the layer’s preview thumbnail as seen in here.

Layer Mask Thumbnail

It is important to understand that layer masks use only white, black, and shades of gray.  These colors are simply used to control the transparency of the layer under the mask. Now, we know that white means 100% visible so what do you think black is?  That’s right, black “masks” the layer making it 100% transparent.  Gray is going to be somewhere in between.  In our case, we want to show the photo of the girl with her eyes open without affecting the rest of the team.  We are going to paint on the mask in black to reveal the layer below.  To do this, select the Brush tool from the Tools Panel or with the keyboard shortcut “B”.

Select The Brush Tool

We will be painting in black so we need to make sure black is selected as our foreground color which is the Photoshop default.  You can always set your colors back to this with the keyboard shortcut “D”.

Setting Black As Foreground Color

You need to make sure you are painting on the mask and not the layer itself, so make sure to click on the white layer mask thumbnail in the Layers Panel.  When it is selected a white box will appear around the thumbnail.  You won’t get too far if you have the layer selected by mistake because you will immediately see black being painted directly on your image, which is not what you want to see.

Targeting The Layer Mask

You should be able to see a circle for your cursor that shows you the brush size.  As a real quick side note, if you don’t see the circle indicating your brush size make sure that your Caps-Lock is set to OFF.  If Caps-Lock is on it disables the brush size indicator, it took me forever to figure this out so hopefully this saves someone a little hassle.  You can adjust the brush size manually in the upper left side of the toolbar or by using the open or close bracket “[ ]” keyboard shortcuts.    You want to use one of the fuzzy brushes because you need to blend it in nicely or it will look unnatural.

Brush Size

Now we just paint in black on the mask over the girl’s face and, like magic, it reveals the layer below which has her eyes open.  If you mess up and paint too much black just use the keyboard shortcut “X” to swap the foreground and background colors and paint the area back in with white.  As you can see in our finished photo below, the girl’s eyes are now open and the rest of the team photo hasn’t been modified at all.

Finished Photo

Conclusion

You can see how layer masks can save you a ton of time and headache when you need to blend group photos together.  This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power of layer masks in Photoshop CS6 and countless hours can be spent on the different ways to use them.  However, by starting out with a simple project like this one you can easily learn the basics of masking without getting discouraged by the complexity of the tool.

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