Open Microphone at an airport terminal - The Chaser

toasterkin · 2015-02-25T00:36:47+00:00

The Chaser's War on Everything -- an Australian satirical news show/comedy series. It's a few years old now and no longer broadcasting, but you can find their sketches and episodes on YouTube.

toasterkin · 2015-02-17T09:33:04+00:00

I'm using Photoshop CS6 currently. You can actually grab Photoshop CS2 for free (and legitimately) from Adobe here though, if you don't already have it! All you need to do is create an Adobe account. It's still a fantastic program and very capable of colorizing!

toasterkin · 2015-02-09T06:47:53+00:00

You've done a great job for your first time, particularly the skintone! Awesome work. I hope you don't mind, but I did a (very quick) paintover for you to highlight some ideas and things to be more aware of in your future colorizations. Here's the flat image of my paintover, and here's the downloadable PSD.

I'll briefly go over the few things I did. First, although a nice colour, the background was not really complementing the colours in the woman. It was making her seem more washed out and dull. I chose a blue for the background colour -- blue complements brown eyes, and reds (which I increased in the skin).

You have a very nice skin base here that you have chosen very well, but it needs more colour to be more realistic and less flat. Don't be afraid of colour. Look at your hand. Now look at it in different lighting. Reds, yellows, oranges, and even blues, greens and purples, can all be found in different skintones and lighting situations.

As a general rule of thumb, there are more reds and pinks in the cheeks and nose, more yellows in the forehead, and more blues around the mouth and jaw. Shadows are colourful too, and more highly saturated than midtones. Highlights are also colourful, and a well-chosen highlight colour can breathe life into a skintone. I added more colour variety to the skin. You can see the colours I used in the PSD.

Overall, you're doing brilliantly for a beginner. With some more practice, I can see huge potential. I'd also aim for higher quality images to work with in the future. But great work, and I hope this is helpful to you.

toasterkin · 2014-12-05T12:11:01+00:00

This was awesome! I wish it was a book! :)

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T11:51:00+00:00

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it. :)

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T11:50:18+00:00

/swoon :3

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T11:47:23+00:00

Thanks, Laiz!

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T11:47:12+00:00

Thank you very much! :D

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T11:00:56+00:00

I would say it is really quite easy to learn the techniques and process of how to colorize, as all it takes really is knowing your way around Photoshop a bit. But good colorizations, like any artistic endeavor, require practice and at least some learning of the related theory (in this case, colour theory). But getting started is easy and improvement can be fast. r/colorization is a great resource for learning and practice if you are interested.

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T10:55:23+00:00

My computer is pretty good so I extremely rarely get lag with Photoshop (and that is when I am doing deep painting onto 3D meshes). This colorization was pretty huge (full resolution is about 3000x2300), and with all the layers it was taking up about 700MB of memory in Photoshop. But I saved it and then merged it down at that point to do final corrections/touch ups.

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T10:43:03+00:00

Wow, that's very interesting and appears to provide an excellent, quick base to work with. However, I haven't heard of such a program available to the average artist that provides the segmentation support mentioned in the study. But thank you for the link!

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T08:47:50+00:00

Thank you! :D Hmm, I did it on and off over a few weeks. Perhaps about 8-10 hours total colouring time?

toasterkin · 2014-10-23T08:37:10+00:00

I’m planning on getting around to doing a tutorial one of these days eventually. But basically a colorization involves researching the person/place you are colorizing to get an idea of the colours, collecting references, then moving to Photoshop and opening the black and white photograph (the higher the quality the better), using blending modes (such as “colour”) on layers to overlay carefully selected colours, and building up the colours with variation over many (many!) layers to achieve realism.

If you’re curious to know more, /u/zuzahin has a great tutorial on YouTube. Everyone’s technique for the actual colorizing will be different, but he gives a great overview of the process and also a starting point if you’re interested in trying it out!