2000 AD Online Forum

Hi there, wondering if any kind soul skilled in the art of photoshop can help me out with something. I colour my illos in PS, using a variation of the 'cut and grad' technique, which works great for me.
However, my main problem with using it is actually deciding on a colour scheme or colour palette. I tend to just pick colours at random from the colour picker, and the results sometimes look a bit too bright, busy and scattershot, even after tinkering with hue/sat, and i'd like my images to have a more unified, restrained feel (i'm digging kev walker's palette, for example). Basically, are there any tips/rules about picking a coherent colour scheme i should know about? I've searched high and low on the web, but most colouring tutorials don't really cover this aspect in any depth. If anyone can point me in the direction of one it'd be much appreciated.
Cheers

Drag a picture with your preferred colour scheme into photoshop, then use the eyedropper tool to pick the colours you want.
Not ideal, but quick.

My advice would be not to worry too much about getting the colours right when you're first applying them - when you're separating out the page into areas of colour treat it as just the laborious process that makes it easier to 'bucket fill' or adjust the colour balance of (or however you wish to do it) with the right colours later when you can concentrate solely on picking colours. Pick token colours for things, don't worry too much about saturation.

I've found a good method to get a colour scheme is colour everything with predictible colours (i.e.roughly the colours they are) then put a big block of colour over the top of the panel (or whole page if you want it all consistent) on a layer above. Set this layer to colour mode. Then you can play with the opacity of that layer to change the saturation of that colour into all the other colours and play with the colour balance to change the colour itself. You're narrowing colour range of the panel/page but that's probably what you want if you're after a colour scheme.

You can also use a dark colour and set the layer to Multiply and it'll make the panels darker with the colour (or set to Lighten for the opposite effect). This is useful for night-time scenes. It's like using a colour filter on a camera as done to death by the likes of Guy Richie.

If you take all the various layers of colour filtering off one of my pages, the original layer of colour looks pretty crap and lacking in atmosphere.

Need any more help and I can email you a (scaled-down) page with the layers intact if I can get the file size low enough.

ADE

Have you read through the D'israeli tutorial?

Link: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/lynnfo/educatio/colou

As I recall, D'Israeli has quite a laborious method of creating a layer of just inks to keep on top of the colours. If anyone tries to follow his tutorial, bear in mind you can do it much easier by just duplicating the layer of the scanned page, setting it to 'Multiply' mode and colouring on a layer under that.

And his colours are gaudy.

ADE

Thanks a lot to you all. I'll give all these things a try. The Disraeli tutorial thing looks good, must have slipped me by. I don't use layers at all normally, except for text and stuff, generally do it all with channels, keeping the inks on an alpha channel.
It's only recently I've started to think about colour a lot, and I think that i tend to colour my stuff a bit too literally, if you know what i mean, and i feel as if i may be unwittingly breaking some 'laws' of colouring or something. I'm confident enough with my drawing, but the colours often seem to let me down.
Sorry for prattling on - Any more suggestions, especially on creating custom palettes, please keep them coming.
Thanks again.

If you haven't already, join the Artdroids group and prattle on with the rest of us for as long as you like.

ADE

Link: Artdroids

That sounds cool. I've submitted to join, so maybe see you round there sometime.
Cheers.

Don't use layers!!!

How do you survive. Pop your B&W line drawing on a multiply layer, drop another layer underneath fill that in white and then sandwich a layer inbetween to colour onto, simple really. You can add other layers inbetween the top and bottom and even use each one for a different colour. I tend to have a base layer of a midtone on the second to bottom layer (above the white), then using the same colour but on an 'overlay' layer above the midtone I use this for highlights, above this on a multiply layer using the same colour again I use this for shade then on each layer I just darken (multiply) or lighten (overlay) the colour to twaek the effect. You could add further layers in between these to add even more shade or highlights - works a treat.

This is the best example I could fiind of the technique I'm talking about. By mixing the properties of the layers and differing the opacities by over laying the layers (much like how you use watercolours) you get this kind of effect and you can alter the depth by altering the opacity's without having to use the history brush...

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

ADE

No offence, but i think we're getting off the point a bit. My enquiry was more about actually choosing colours that go well together, and having a colour scheme that holds a page together (eg - i find it difficult to colour backgrounds and not have them overwhelm the foreground). Basically I'm after tips on creating and using a limited palette that doesn't overpower the work, do's and dont's, that sort of thing.

I'm quite happy with the actual technique I use, and I do use layers for adding final touches, I just tend to find they make your computer run very slowly, and a lot can be achieved using only channels. Maybe I will try to use layers more in the future. For the most part I just use the technique on

Link: here

Ok, now I'm waiting for someone to say 'OMG! Don't use that technique! That looks horrible! etc!'
:)

Try finding a colour wheel on the net. This will show you the conflicting colours such as red/blue.

Bit like this one.

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

"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.

"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?

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.

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?

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.

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

Link: Photobucket