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neonsimmer16 · 5 years ago

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Recoloring Tutorial – Detail Separation

First, I do this differently than just picking the darkest swatch. I’ll use the darker swatch later, but right now is just separation. So, for things like zippers, you want to pick the swatch with the most different/contrast between detail color and the fabric. If there’s no difference in any of the swatches, that’s still doable but far more difficult.

So for this, I’ll pick this bright pink swatch, because it stands out far more than zipper on the black:

Now you need to get you magic wand tool and set the tolerance in these two places:

Unfortunately, the tolerance is a bit of a guess. Higher means it will include more and more colors to select. Useful for a pretty large, pretty solid area. I usually use anywhere between 5 and 50. I’ve left it at 30 and clicked part of the zipper:

That may seem like it’s not set right, but I think that’s a pretty good amount. I’d rather do smaller bits at a time. So to keep adding bits, you hold shift while clicking somewhere else again. If you mess up and it selects stuff you don’t want, you can either just go to your history window on the right and go back, hit undo (control + z), or use windows + alt and click. I don’t recommend using windows + alt though until you’re doing clean up with the lasso tool and not the magic wand.

Here I’ve clicked most of the areas I need, but you can see it’s not perfect. You can keep messing with tolerance if you want to, but this is where I would get the lasso tool:

The lasso tool is right above the magic wand:

Now with that, you have to hand select by drawing. To add areas, hold down shift while drawing, like you did with the magic wand and do that until you’ve selected the little bits you missed. I find this easier than trying to hand select everything. You can also use the box selection tool (right above the lasso tool) in the same way for boxy bits if you want to. I’ll use that for the rectangular zipper prongs later.

To remove the bits it overselected, hold windows + alt and select the pink area. This isn’t perfect either, I’d redo it more carefully, but you can see the method:

I tend to go back and forth between lassoing, box selection etc for adding and removing bits. I’m not being a super perfectionist for this tutorial, so I’ll move on with it done well enough.

You can select any other part of the texture right now you want included in colorizing together. Don’t worry if you miss something though, you can add it back in later. Now you want hit control +c, then immediately control + v. You’ve pasted the zipper directly on top of the old zipper in a new layer. It will be deselected but now you’re on the zipper layer. Name your layers! It can get confusing if you don’t and you’ve separated a bunch of things. Also, at this point, save your file as a PSD to retain the layers.

Now, if you want to use an entirely different swatch texture with the zipper you just separated, you would pull out that texture like you did for this one, select the whole texture in Photoshop and paste it into the file. Make sure you’re on the background layer so it pastes below the zipper layer. If you don’t you can still change the sorting order, just drag the zipper layer above the new layer just created.

It should look like this now:

You can see the zipper is sloppy and retaining pink bits. This makes it easy to clean up even more. Click back to the zipper layer and use the eraser tool to erase some of the big pink blobs.

You don’t need to worry about getting it all, because some of that is just stray mess and is still zipper. I’ve taken it down to about here:

Now, staying on that layer, control + shift + U. Desaturate to remove all the stray pink on the zipper itself:

Now, try colorizing and see how smoothly it blends into the fabric. This is pretty decent:

You can use the smudge tool to bring it out further and smooth it a bit, which is here (check the strength, lower moves it less, higher more):

Before I go through much of that effort though, I want to check in studio how it looks on the pants. Hit control +shift + e to merge the layers. DO NOT SAVE. That will save your PSD merged and if you close it, you will lose your layers and cannot restore them.

Once it’s merged, control + a to select the whole texture and control + c to copy. Then paste it over the file you took the other texture from (or on the first original texture file you pulled,), hit control + shift + E on *that* file and save. Then import that into Studio. Go back to PSD and go back in the history to unmerge to make sure you don’t accidentally save it merged. You’ll also want your layers back to make adjustments.

Not too awful, but it definitely needs blending. I’d use a mix of the smudge tool I showed you and the blur tool. It’s in the same area. Just go around those edges to smooth it.

I’ll stop this tutorial here, but that’s the basic process. If you want to merge parts together to color together, drag the the layers to be next to each other, right click the layer above the one you want to merge it with and click “merge down.” Now they’ll be combined and you can color those two things together.

I hope I explained this well enough, this is hard to show. I also hope my gifs actually animate because Tumblr likes to mess with my gifs.

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