Colouring in Photoshop

[Adrian Bamforth]

As with inking, there are ways of bringing things forward into the foreground and sending things back into the background. In inking you might use a heavier line weight or greater use of shadows to bring things forward, thinner lines with less shadows to send things back.

Similarly, intense saturations of colour will make things jump forward to the eye against paler pastel colours. Imagine looking through a thin fog, more distant objects are paler. You can create a white 'fog' on a layer on top of the colour layer (painted only over the 'background' areas in the picture) and play with the opacity. If it's looks like a foggy day the opacity might be too high. You can put this over the ink layer as well if you want the lines 'fogged' also. This is no use of course if you're depicting a dark scene, but then you can make your fog from a dark colour and play with the opacity of that).

ADE

[Misanthrope]

"Similarly, intense saturations of colour will make things jump forward to the eye against paler pastel colours. Imagine looking through a thin fog, more distant objects are paler. You can create a white 'fog' on a layer on top of the colour layer (painted only over the 'background' areas in the picture) and play with the opacity"

I did somthing similar on this.

[LARF]

"Now I'm confused, do you want him to use layers or not, or did you mean don't use channels?"

Sorry should have been '????' rather than exclamation.

Apologies for the misinterpretation. What I meant about the layers thing was that it's then very easy to alter the individual colours within the image, because they are on layers, to experiment with different palettes after you have laid the colours highlights and shade down.

Radiator it may also be a good idea to look at colour theory as well and how colours affect the mood of the reader. Re: your computer slowing down when you use layers what kind of system are you running, which version of Pshop and how are your scratch disks configured?

[Wils]

One possible way of helping would be to make a blank document and just roughly splurge on bits of colour you're thinking of using next to each other. Even like this, you'll see if tehy work together or not.

Method-wise, I think everyone has their own way and shouldn't be knocked if they get the kind of results they're looking for. Although it's been years since I did any colouring (and I was never exactly much cop, anyway, tbh), I'd generally use layers for each section's base colour, highlights and shadows and any more for effects or textures. I'd also have the black line art on a layer on its own, right at the top of the pile. That method needs a lot of memory for larger, print quality pictures, but has always worked for me.

[radiator]

Cheers all. Some good tips there that I can try out. Larf, I'm using PS 7.0 on my pc - although I'm not sure of the exact specs, it IS quite old, bought it second hand about three years ago. I have a SCSI disk that I've set as my primary scratch disk, but again, don't know how big it is - I'm not really a techy person!
All I know is if I'm working on an image that's bigger than A4 at 300dpi or more (in rgb/cmyk), it does tend to get a bit slow, especially if you start playing around with layers.
Can anyone tell me how to post images on the board? Do they need to already be online?

[Carlsborg Expert]

Yes the images have to be put on the web. So far the best thing to do is get a photoshgop account.

Perhaps you have been informed by the artdroids.

This is not entirely altruistic either. Can anyone tell me how I find the mutiple layers button on the photoshop 8?
And the sort all my work out into beautiful rendered pictures how I like button too? lol.

[johnnystress]

Use photobucket (or similar)to post pictures on the board

Link: Photobucket