hand painting photos & other tricks
Rusty Wright
make it look like a color image. Someone suggested opening another
picture with similar things in it and to eyedropper the colors from
the other picture and then paint with those colors. One problem with
that is that the eyedropper will also pick up the grayscale component
of the other picture. If the layer you're painting on isn't the right
mode, that grayscale component could cause problems by changing the
final grayscale value when you flatten the image.
Here's an experiment to show what I mean: make a new image, 600 pixels
wide, 200 pixels tall, rgb mode. Set the foreground and background to
black and white. Select the gradient tool and drag from the left edge
to the right edge, use the shift key to keep it straight. You should
have black on the left and white on the right. Set up your Info
palette so it shows Actual Color and Grayscale. If I put the cursor
right under the "y" in the image title bar where it says "(Layer 1,
RGB, 1:1)" (on Windows, dunno about the Mac) the K readout in the Info
palette says 52%. If I make a new layer, mode is Soft Light, and fill
it with pure red (rgb = 255,0,0), and then put the cursor in the same
spot, the K readout says 62%. Change the layer mode to Color and then
it changes to 48%.
Next, try changing the layer's opacity to 60%. Now the K levels match
a lot better. Also test the K level under the closing ")" and under
the "U" of "Untitled-1", turning off and on the red layer.
I've been using Soft Light mode for colorizing pictures but I'm
beginning to think that maybe Color mode is better.
Anyhow, the other thing I wanted to babble about is getting rid of
that grayscale component. For a long time I kept wondering, how could
you take a color image and remove the grayscale part leaving just the
color? It finally occured to me that Lab mode is the ticket. Take a
color image and do Mode>Lab Color. Then select the Channels palette
and click on the Lightness channel; it's the grayscale version of your
color picture. Make white the foreground color (click on the tiny
black and white overlapping squares near the bottom of the tools
palette, then click on the curved double-headed arrow). Do an
Alt+Backspace to fill the Lightness channel with white. Click on the
Lab channel. There's your image with the grayscale part removed.
Ok, do File>Revert to get your color picture back. Do
Image>Duplicate. To the duplicate image do what we did before; change
it to Lab Color and fill the Lightness channel with white. Then do a
Select>All followed by an Edit>Copy (make sure you're copying the Lab
channel, not the Lightness channel). To the original image do an
Image>Adjust>Desaturate. Then do an Edit>Paste Layer. Set the mode
of the new layer to Color. Looks a lot like the original image
doesn't it? Do an Image>Duplicate to this image. Then to the
original do a File>Revert to get it back, so you can eyeball it with
the one with the Color layer.
Although I think this is interesting, I haven't found anything useful
to do with it yet. If you like to do the usual Photoshop image
mangling stuff, you could try using a filter on the Background
(grayscale) image. For example, the Gallery Effects watercolor
filter. But it's easier to just convert the image to Lab Color and
fiddle with the Lightness channel. What we have here is something
where we can fiddle with the color part of the image. One of the
things that I'm playing with is duplicating the color layer, then
running the Pixelate>Crystallize filter on it, then running the
Stylize>Find Edges filter. On this "found edges" layer, set the mode
to Multiply. You get these squiggly color lines. Play with this
layer's opacity to get the right effect.
Once I get KPT 3.0 I'll probably have lots of other things I could
try.
One of the things that I think may be useful to do with this "color
only" image is if you have a picture where the colors are washed out
is to duplicate the picture, and with the duplicate convert it to the
color only version (Lab Color mode with the Light channel filled with
white), then copy the color only picture and paste it as a layer on
the original picture. Set the new layer's mode to Multiply. Super
saturation. Do a Mode>Gamut Warning; yowie! Let's hope you're not
going to try and print that thing. Fiddle with the layer's opacity to
make it more reasonable.
If you blur the color layer you can get some interesting halo
effects.
This thing needs experimenting.