Hi Mudge, I tried to paste the link to the tutorial I used, but I have changed it so much it isn't a bit the same, so here goes my explanation.
Normally I start a picture by colouring the skin first, but in this example I am going to show you how to do the rest of the picture as the skin tonings are a little more difficult (still not hard) but I thought we would see if I can explain myself clearly before going to a harder place, okay? I am adding the shortcut buttons too, you probably know them, but just in case.
This is just a quick run through of how to colour in Photoshop, I hope by the time you follow the steps you will be able to get a good colouring on your pictures.
Step 1, get a good clean picture, one that is scanned at at least 300, but preferably 500 PDI.
Step 2, Now take your lasso (press the letter
L on your keyboard as a shortcut). Select a small part of the first item you wish to colour, perhaps a shirt or dress, whatever. Do not try to lasso the whole thing, just make a small triangle shape in the middle of the object.
Step 3, Now go to Layer on the top Menu then hold you mouse over New Adjustment Layer and click on curves. A New box will pop up, name the curves layer whatever you are colouring, eg dress. Now click OK and a layers box will pop up. There are four colours in the top drop down box, they all have their own graph, by moving the line of the graph up or down you will alter the colour of the item you are colouring, play with all four of the lines to see the effect they have on the selected part of your item.. Once you find a good colour you can click the save button and save the colour for future use in other pictures. Making up your colours for your first picture will take up a bit of time, but once you have colours saved to your colour box you can use them again and again in different picture, darkening or lightening as you like. Now you have a colour you for the item you are colouring click OK and you will be back at your picture.
Step 4, Press the
B button on your keyboard to get the paintbrush. Use the brush menu up the top of the screen to pick a soft edged brush, it doesn’t matter what size. Now use
CTRL + or
CTRL – to zoom in and out on your picture, zoom in until you are close enough to start colouring your item. Use the { } (bracket) buttons to make your brush bigger or smaller for your needs. Then start to colour your item. You can zoom in very close to get a good edge and not go out of the lines, but if you do go outside the lines, just press the
X key on your keyboard and go over the bit outside the lines .
X switches between white and black, white adds colour and black removes colour. See the little black and white overlapping boxes in the tools pallet on the left hand side of your screen. Press X a few times and watch the boxes replace each other.
Step 5, Once you have coloured your selected item, if you do not like the colour, double click on the small graph beside the layer in the layers palette, the curves box for that layer will pop up and you can change the colour to suit you.
Step 6, Now just select another little piece of your next item repeat the steps above and colour that, each item will have its own layer and you can alter it whenever you like. Once you have completed your picture you can flatten all your layers and save to jpeg for posting onto Roots. If you are doing a colouring for someone else, do not flatten the picture, just save another copy as jpeg, cause sure as shooting they will want something changed and you cannot do it if you have flattened your layers and not kept the larger copy.
Let me know if this is followable (is that a word) and I will show you how to do skin tonings next.
Happy colouring
Lones
