Wednesday, November 24, 1999

L & L for Imaginos - In Color!


The line work is mostly undisturbed from the grayscale original. The biggest revision (read: "nuisance") was smudging out edge jaggies: somehow, during the resampling down to display size, the layers interacted to create horrible fringes. [Editor's Note: I eventually discovered that flattening the image first makes resampling go much more, uh, smoothly.]  I also removed the old pencilled cast shadows, in favor of a separate airbrushed layer.

While colorizing this image, I discovered a nifty timesaver for skin tone shading. I have a lot more experience working in black and white and grayscale, so it didn't take me long to smooth out my initial pencil cross-hatching into gray modeling. But grays look dead and horrible overlaid on a skin tone base. Using Photoshop's "Image -> Adjust -> Curves", I remapped the grayscale values to a variable-hue gradient, running from dark red through sepia to pale greenish beige tones to white. Much nicer overlay for the two base tones I used here. Also very quick-- and repeatable.

The gradient from green "lawn" to blue "night" added some depth, but it needed more cues. So I loaded a temporary image with Gaussian noise, applied a motion blur, and "tilted" it back with a perspective transform. Had to make it real big, to have enough height left after tilting.

Gnabbist

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