![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
london_fan in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
house_of_londonWell, since ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sireesanwar and trekchic asked me nicely to share my colouring process and weren't deterred by the fact that I use GIMP instead of Photoshop, I tried to compile some sort of tutorial. Unfortunately I wasn't able to recreate the exact steps on my pre-existing icons, because I quite often flatten and merge layers and don't save the exact settings of the tools used. However, there are some steps that I follow almost always, so I simply created a new icon for this tutorial, recording the whole process in detail. Hopefully this tutorial is helpful for you. Enjoy!
sireesanwar and trekchic asked me nicely to share my colouring process and weren't deterred by the fact that I use GIMP instead of Photoshop, I tried to compile some sort of tutorial. Unfortunately I wasn't able to recreate the exact steps on my pre-existing icons, because I quite often flatten and merge layers and don't save the exact settings of the tools used. However, there are some steps that I follow almost always, so I simply created a new icon for this tutorial, recording the whole process in detail. Hopefully this tutorial is helpful for you. Enjoy! Some annotations before we start:
That being said, off we go!
STEP 1: CREATING THE ICON TEMPLATE
To show my colouring process, I choose a rather dark screencap on purpose. You can find a lot of great Star Trek screencaps here.
(Click image for the large original size)
After the most basic cropping (I hate cutting off Spock's lovely pointy ears and eyebrows) to get my icon template I changed a small patch of the background before resizing the image to 100x100 px.
The bright spot in the corner bothered me...
...so I used the Rectangle Select Tool to copy a matching part...
... and cover the bright patch with several layers before resizing to 100x100px:
Looking at the resized image I found that I still wasn’t happy with this part of the background. That's way too distracting from the lovely shape of Spock's ears, right?!
So I added a transparent layer, used the Colour Picker Tool to choose a matching dark colour from the nearby background and painted over the distracting bright spots.
And that's the finished icon template!
STEP 2: ADJUST COLOUR LEVELS
(Brighten things up and bring out some contrast)
This step looks extreme and counterproductive on its own, but it's totally necessary to stick a more lively colouring on the image afterwards. I usually use Hue-Saturation to "brighten up" the image and bring out some contrast.
I strongly recommend to not change your original template, but rather make changes to a new duplicated layer! You probably know that already, but better to be safe than sorry!
Don't worry if the picture looks rather drained after this step! It's better to overdo it at this point, because you can always fix that by simply reducing the opacity of this layer later on. So go wild here!
You can see my rather extreme changes to the "Input Levels" here!
Looks rather ugly, doesn't it? ;)
STEP 3: BRING ON THE COLOURS!
(My three magic layers! Yeah, I love them so much!)
As I mentioned totrekchic I have a favourite set of textures that I almost always use to achieve the colouring I like: 20 LIGHT TEXTURES by teh_s0njanator. This set includes my ...
THREE MAGIC TEXTURES
Sometimes I substitute one of these with a similar texture, but ultimately a certain combination of these three layers in particular seems to always work out quite well. Obviously I still change the textures themselves to fit the contours of my respective image content. Depending on the colouring of the original icon sometimes some colour adjustment might be necessary, too. Anyway, let's look at the process...
I usually start by adding the orange texture tx2.png as a new layer. The purpose here is to bring out a more natural healthy skin tone, therefore you want to have the brighter patch to cover any parts of skin, in this case Spock's face. Obviously the texture won't always match your image, so just use the Smudge Tool and — if necessary — some Gaussian Blur until the colour placement fits. For this icon the required changes were minor:
Set the layer to Soft Light and Opacity to 36.
As I mentioned above you might notice at this point that our "Adjusted colour levels" layer is in fact draining too much of the colour, but that's easy to fix by simply reducing the Opacity. In this case I changed the setting from 100 to 75...
... to give us the following result:
Not too bad!
Now we add the texture tx12.png as a new layer. The purpose is to a) once again bring out a more natural skin tone by having the brighter parts overlay Spock's face here, but also to b) add depth to the whole icon by having the darker border cover the background. To be honest, this specific icon here doesn't even need this step due to its lack of colour variety in general, but I decided to still throw it in here just to show you, because this texture works magically if you have an image with more background surface and/or more colours. However, in this instance it will just enhance Spock's face and push back the background quite subtly. To achieve this effect the layer must first be rotated/flipped and smudged to fit the icon image:
Soft Light and Opacity at 20:
A very subtle change indeed.
At this point I often create a new layer using the New from Visible option to make further changes by adjusting the icon with the Hue-Saturation tool. Powering up the Saturation will make the colours pop just nicely, whereas minimal changes to the Hue bar in either direction let you change the overall skin tone. Honestly, you can fix a lot of issues with too yellow or too pink skin in this step! Just try to find the perfect balance.
Saturation 20 and Hue 3 work great for this icon!
I like the overall result so far!
Last but not least we throw in tx5.png as a new layer. This one allows for the most important modification of an image. It offers endless possibilities of emphasizing parts of your image, visually pulling certain areas into the foreground while pushing others into the background. It can also work wonders for smoothing out sharp shadowing on faces or even create the illusion of a completely different lighting. That's why I call this texture my spotlight layer. You can either keep the transition between the very bright and very dark parts of the texture as smooth as in the original texture or you can create a sharper contrast by creating sharper "borders" matching the contours of your image. However, in most cases I'd advise against extremely sharp borders, because they create an unnatural look. Anyway, what you want to do here is to play around with the effects by setting the layer to Overlay with a reduced Opacity setting. Just keep moving it over your image while resizing/smudging/painting over it until you have the best results! For this icon it looked something like this:
As you can see, the stretching with the Perspective tool can leave transparent empty spaces. Just cover them with the Paintbrush tool after choosing the matching colour with the Colour Picker tool (that's one of the reasons I create a new image layer before this step). After some more smudging and blurring I ended up with the following layer:
Overlay and Opacity at 20:
Once again, I didn't aim for drastic changes with this specific icon, but for other images you might even keep the Opacity at 100 if you have a lot of background to "drown out". The bright spotlight also tends to whiten out any skin tones, so it might be helpful to change the colours of this layer or use one with less contrast, e.g. tx1.png from the same set.
Anyway, I wasn't happy with the overall result so far, because the icon was still way too washed out for my liking, so I added another copy of my modified version of the orange texture tx2.png and played around with. Ultimately I settled on a more yellow colour by using the Hue-Saturation and cranking up the Hue bar to 13 and setting the layer to Soft Light and Opacity at 40.
Yes, that's more like it, right?
And that sums up the very basics of my colouring process using my three magic textures! Hopefully my explanations were somewhat helpful? Anyway, I'll add some more information on my fine tuning process, because I did quite a bit here to fix some remaining issues and the methods used here are actually quite helpful to fix a lot of flaws. Hopeful there are some good tips for you, too?
STEP 4: FINE TUNING
(A perfectionist's work is never done... or sometimes I just don't know when to quit)
Well, after colouring an icon, I quite often find that it enhances some pre-existing imperfections that were barely visible in the original icon template. Sometimes the colouring effects even create new issues, so I try to always fine-tune my icons. I enlarged the icon for the following screenshots, so the issues are easier to spot. Let's start and see what can be improved here...
You can see the green-ish/cyan hue all over the eyes and eyebrows. That's actually a very common issue with darker images. Fortunately it's not very hard to fix in most cases.
Select the general area with the Lasso tool.
Open Hue-Saturation and mark the colour you want to change, here it is Cyan.
Now start playing with the settings. These worked just fine for a natural brown colouration.
That's so much better already!
Taking a closer look I wasn't too thrilled with the way the whole forehead area looked too bright near the top border. Again, this is a common issue with bigger patches of skin on the edge of your image if you work with close-ups of facial expressions.
It looks like Spock's forehead wants to leave this icon. Badly. ;)
An easy solution here is adding a new transparent layer and fill it partially with the Gradient tool. I used the FG to Transparent with # FFBB8B as my FG colour.
Use the Eraser tool for the area around the eyes.
Set the Gradient layer to LCh Colour at Opacity 30.
The saturated forehead looks better now!
I'll show you another method to achieve a similar effect that actually works best to "darken up" and smooth out small patches that are too bright and should blend in with a nearby darker colour. Let's see...
There are some glossy areas of skin that could do with some blending.
Use the Colour Picker tool and select a slightly darker colour from the area right next to the one(s) you want to darken up and create a new layer filled with this colour. I picked # EEE0D6 here.
Set Darken Only at Opacity 60.
Just a minor improvement, but still...
I'll share yet another simple method (similar to one we've seen already above) to fix single patches of skin that are a bit "discoloured". Interestingly I need to use it quite often with Star Trek (AOS) graphics, because... LENS FLARES! Seriously, J. J. Abrams' infamous lens flares are the natural enemy of graphic makers. Just try to find any decent screencaps of key scenes on the Enterprise bridge without any lens flare. I dare you! ;)
Back to the issue(s) at hand, though. Obviously none of the following imperfections were really in need of fxing, but I just wanted to show you the general idea. Just select a small discoloured patch you want to fix with the Lasso tool and open Hue-Saturation and change the numbers to your liking!
Almost invisible changes, I know...
And finally there was still one real imperfection that actually needed fixing, because it would have bothered me immensely if I had overlooked it before sharing this icon!
Oops, looks like I missed some green tinge where it doesn't belong!
Just add a transparent layer and use the Paintbrush tool to paint over the area with Spock's "proper" hair colour...
... and set it to Darken Only at Opacity 66.
All better now!
Anyway, I offer a virtual cookie for anybody who is still reading this, but don't worry, we're almost done! There are some finishing touches that I add in one way or another to almost all my icons to bring a final "pop "to the overall colouring. First, let's add a layer filled with # EDFBFF.
Set Divide at Opacity 50.
Wow, the changes are almost invisible with the images side by side, but they are quite noticeable when you switch between them in GIMP! Anyway, at this point I noticed how colourless Spock's lips appear compared to the original screencap, so I wanted to add a tiny splash of colour here.
Create a new transparent layer and select the area of Spock's lips with the Lasso tool.
Fill with # AB2424 and smudge the edges as needed.
Set to Darken Only at Opacity 36.
I like the enhanced lip colour!
One more step and we're done. Well, almost. In theory at least. You'll see! ;) Looking at the icon, I decided that it needed one final enhancement to make the colouring look more saturated. A simple solution is to add another layer filled with # EEE5D6.
Set to Linear Burn at Opacity 40.
Perfect!
Or so I thought at the time, but then I saw this icon on a dark background and noticed yet another imperfection that bothered me enough to fix it, too. This really is the last step, promise! ;)
Look at this distracting bright grey smudge here. Urgh.
Create a new transparent layer and cover the area
with the Paintbrush tool in a matching colour.
AND WE'RE FINALLY DONE!
If you're interested you can take a look at all the layers here. If you want to poke around my layers "for real" in your own version of GIMP, let me know and can send you the xcf file.
Anyway, this turned out a lot longer and way more extensive than I had anticipated when I started, so hopefully it was worth the effort. Please let me know if you have any questions. Also, I'd love to see if you create anything using something from this "little" tutorial! Honestly, that would make me very happy! Thanks for reading.
- This is supposed to be a very basic colouring tutorial without any fancy techniques to crop images, change backgrounds or add other special effects. The resulting "guinea pig" icon might be a bit over-coloured, but I wanted to show all changes more clearly. If I actually wanted to use this icon for real, I'd probably still tweak some settings to tone it down a bit.
- To make this easier for GIMP newbies I downloaded and used the Current Stable Version of GIMP which is GIMP 2.10.12 at the moment.
- GIMP can be set up in many different ways. If you're unfamiliar with the program I recommend playing around and rearranging the tools and working areas until you've figured out the set-up that works best for you. It'll be worth the effort and time!
- Hopefully my explanations make sense if you're not (yet) familiar with GIMP. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
That being said, off we go!
To show my colouring process, I choose a rather dark screencap on purpose. You can find a lot of great Star Trek screencaps here.
(Click image for the large original size)
After the most basic cropping (I hate cutting off Spock's lovely pointy ears and eyebrows) to get my icon template I changed a small patch of the background before resizing the image to 100x100 px.
The bright spot in the corner bothered me...
...so I used the Rectangle Select Tool to copy a matching part...
... and cover the bright patch with several layers before resizing to 100x100px:
Looking at the resized image I found that I still wasn’t happy with this part of the background. That's way too distracting from the lovely shape of Spock's ears, right?!
So I added a transparent layer, used the Colour Picker Tool to choose a matching dark colour from the nearby background and painted over the distracting bright spots.
|
➔ |  |
And that's the finished icon template!
(Brighten things up and bring out some contrast)
This step looks extreme and counterproductive on its own, but it's totally necessary to stick a more lively colouring on the image afterwards. I usually use Hue-Saturation to "brighten up" the image and bring out some contrast.
I strongly recommend to not change your original template, but rather make changes to a new duplicated layer! You probably know that already, but better to be safe than sorry!
Don't worry if the picture looks rather drained after this step! It's better to overdo it at this point, because you can always fix that by simply reducing the opacity of this layer later on. So go wild here!
You can see my rather extreme changes to the "Input Levels" here!
|
➔ |  |
Looks rather ugly, doesn't it? ;)
(My three magic layers! Yeah, I love them so much!)
As I mentioned to
trekchic I have a favourite set of textures that I almost always use to achieve the colouring I like: 20 LIGHT TEXTURES by teh_s0njanator. This set includes my ... |
 |
 |
Sometimes I substitute one of these with a similar texture, but ultimately a certain combination of these three layers in particular seems to always work out quite well. Obviously I still change the textures themselves to fit the contours of my respective image content. Depending on the colouring of the original icon sometimes some colour adjustment might be necessary, too. Anyway, let's look at the process...
I usually start by adding the orange texture tx2.png as a new layer. The purpose here is to bring out a more natural healthy skin tone, therefore you want to have the brighter patch to cover any parts of skin, in this case Spock's face. Obviously the texture won't always match your image, so just use the Smudge Tool and — if necessary — some Gaussian Blur until the colour placement fits. For this icon the required changes were minor:
|
➔ |  |
Set the layer to Soft Light and Opacity to 36.
As I mentioned above you might notice at this point that our "Adjusted colour levels" layer is in fact draining too much of the colour, but that's easy to fix by simply reducing the Opacity. In this case I changed the setting from 100 to 75...
... to give us the following result:
|
➔ |  |
Now we add the texture tx12.png as a new layer. The purpose is to a) once again bring out a more natural skin tone by having the brighter parts overlay Spock's face here, but also to b) add depth to the whole icon by having the darker border cover the background. To be honest, this specific icon here doesn't even need this step due to its lack of colour variety in general, but I decided to still throw it in here just to show you, because this texture works magically if you have an image with more background surface and/or more colours. However, in this instance it will just enhance Spock's face and push back the background quite subtly. To achieve this effect the layer must first be rotated/flipped and smudged to fit the icon image:
 |
➔ |  |
➔ |  |
Soft Light and Opacity at 20:
|
➔ |  |
At this point I often create a new layer using the New from Visible option to make further changes by adjusting the icon with the Hue-Saturation tool. Powering up the Saturation will make the colours pop just nicely, whereas minimal changes to the Hue bar in either direction let you change the overall skin tone. Honestly, you can fix a lot of issues with too yellow or too pink skin in this step! Just try to find the perfect balance.
Saturation 20 and Hue 3 work great for this icon!
|
➔ |  |
Last but not least we throw in tx5.png as a new layer. This one allows for the most important modification of an image. It offers endless possibilities of emphasizing parts of your image, visually pulling certain areas into the foreground while pushing others into the background. It can also work wonders for smoothing out sharp shadowing on faces or even create the illusion of a completely different lighting. That's why I call this texture my spotlight layer. You can either keep the transition between the very bright and very dark parts of the texture as smooth as in the original texture or you can create a sharper contrast by creating sharper "borders" matching the contours of your image. However, in most cases I'd advise against extremely sharp borders, because they create an unnatural look. Anyway, what you want to do here is to play around with the effects by setting the layer to Overlay with a reduced Opacity setting. Just keep moving it over your image while resizing/smudging/painting over it until you have the best results! For this icon it looked something like this:
As you can see, the stretching with the Perspective tool can leave transparent empty spaces. Just cover them with the Paintbrush tool after choosing the matching colour with the Colour Picker tool (that's one of the reasons I create a new image layer before this step). After some more smudging and blurring I ended up with the following layer:
 |
➔ |  |
Overlay and Opacity at 20:
|
➔ |  |
Once again, I didn't aim for drastic changes with this specific icon, but for other images you might even keep the Opacity at 100 if you have a lot of background to "drown out". The bright spotlight also tends to whiten out any skin tones, so it might be helpful to change the colours of this layer or use one with less contrast, e.g. tx1.png from the same set.
Anyway, I wasn't happy with the overall result so far, because the icon was still way too washed out for my liking, so I added another copy of my modified version of the orange texture tx2.png and played around with. Ultimately I settled on a more yellow colour by using the Hue-Saturation and cranking up the Hue bar to 13 and setting the layer to Soft Light and Opacity at 40.
|
➔ |  |
Yes, that's more like it, right?
And that sums up the very basics of my colouring process using my three magic textures! Hopefully my explanations were somewhat helpful? Anyway, I'll add some more information on my fine tuning process, because I did quite a bit here to fix some remaining issues and the methods used here are actually quite helpful to fix a lot of flaws. Hopeful there are some good tips for you, too?
(A perfectionist's work is never done... or sometimes I just don't know when to quit)
Well, after colouring an icon, I quite often find that it enhances some pre-existing imperfections that were barely visible in the original icon template. Sometimes the colouring effects even create new issues, so I try to always fine-tune my icons. I enlarged the icon for the following screenshots, so the issues are easier to spot. Let's start and see what can be improved here...
You can see the green-ish/cyan hue all over the eyes and eyebrows. That's actually a very common issue with darker images. Fortunately it's not very hard to fix in most cases.
Select the general area with the Lasso tool.
Open Hue-Saturation and mark the colour you want to change, here it is Cyan.
Now start playing with the settings. These worked just fine for a natural brown colouration.
|
➔ |  |
Taking a closer look I wasn't too thrilled with the way the whole forehead area looked too bright near the top border. Again, this is a common issue with bigger patches of skin on the edge of your image if you work with close-ups of facial expressions.
It looks like Spock's forehead wants to leave this icon. Badly. ;)
An easy solution here is adding a new transparent layer and fill it partially with the Gradient tool. I used the FG to Transparent with # FFBB8B as my FG colour.
 |
➔ |  |
Set the Gradient layer to LCh Colour at Opacity 30.
|
➔ |  |
I'll show you another method to achieve a similar effect that actually works best to "darken up" and smooth out small patches that are too bright and should blend in with a nearby darker colour. Let's see...
There are some glossy areas of skin that could do with some blending.
Use the Colour Picker tool and select a slightly darker colour from the area right next to the one(s) you want to darken up and create a new layer filled with this colour. I picked # EEE0D6 here.
Set Darken Only at Opacity 60.
|
➔ |  |
I'll share yet another simple method (similar to one we've seen already above) to fix single patches of skin that are a bit "discoloured". Interestingly I need to use it quite often with Star Trek (AOS) graphics, because... LENS FLARES! Seriously, J. J. Abrams' infamous lens flares are the natural enemy of graphic makers. Just try to find any decent screencaps of key scenes on the Enterprise bridge without any lens flare. I dare you! ;)
Back to the issue(s) at hand, though. Obviously none of the following imperfections were really in need of fxing, but I just wanted to show you the general idea. Just select a small discoloured patch you want to fix with the Lasso tool and open Hue-Saturation and change the numbers to your liking!
|
➔ |  |
And finally there was still one real imperfection that actually needed fixing, because it would have bothered me immensely if I had overlooked it before sharing this icon!
Oops, looks like I missed some green tinge where it doesn't belong!
Just add a transparent layer and use the Paintbrush tool to paint over the area with Spock's "proper" hair colour...
... and set it to Darken Only at Opacity 66.
|
➔ |  |
Anyway, I offer a virtual cookie for anybody who is still reading this, but don't worry, we're almost done! There are some finishing touches that I add in one way or another to almost all my icons to bring a final "pop "to the overall colouring. First, let's add a layer filled with # EDFBFF.
Set Divide at Opacity 50.
|
➔ |  |
Wow, the changes are almost invisible with the images side by side, but they are quite noticeable when you switch between them in GIMP! Anyway, at this point I noticed how colourless Spock's lips appear compared to the original screencap, so I wanted to add a tiny splash of colour here.
Create a new transparent layer and select the area of Spock's lips with the Lasso tool.
Fill with # AB2424 and smudge the edges as needed.
Set to Darken Only at Opacity 36.
|
➔ |  |
One more step and we're done. Well, almost. In theory at least. You'll see! ;) Looking at the icon, I decided that it needed one final enhancement to make the colouring look more saturated. A simple solution is to add another layer filled with # EEE5D6.
Set to Linear Burn at Opacity 40.
|
➔ |  |
Or so I thought at the time, but then I saw this icon on a dark background and noticed yet another imperfection that bothered me enough to fix it, too. This really is the last step, promise! ;)
Look at this distracting bright grey smudge here. Urgh.
Create a new transparent layer and cover the area
with the Paintbrush tool in a matching colour.
|
➔ |  |
AND WE'RE FINALLY DONE!
If you're interested you can take a look at all the layers here. If you want to poke around my layers "for real" in your own version of GIMP, let me know and can send you the xcf file.
Anyway, this turned out a lot longer and way more extensive than I had anticipated when I started, so hopefully it was worth the effort. Please let me know if you have any questions. Also, I'd love to see if you create anything using something from this "little" tutorial! Honestly, that would make me very happy! Thanks for reading.
