1. With the skin areas still selected, use the Blur tool (use a smaller size soft brush, pressure set to 90-100%) to soften the penciled lines of shading in your drawing. PSP: Use the Retouch tool , Retouch Mode=Soften, Paper Texture=None, Opacity 90-100%, Step=1, Hardness=0, Density=100).
2. Be careful around areas like the jawline, ears and nose, which need to retain their sharpness. Use a smaller brush and less pressure (around 30% or less) near these features to avoid blurring them beyond recognition.
3. Duplicate the Blur layer twice. Name the first copy Blur 2 and the second Airbrush. The next few operations will take place on the Airbrush layer. Reduce the opacity of the Airbrush layer to 65%.
4. Make sure the skin area is still selected. If it isn't, go to Select|Load Selection and re-load the "skin" channel. With the skin selected, hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Switch to the Fill tool and select a light gray color from your Swatch palette. Fill in all selected areas with the light gray. PSP: Reload the selection with Selections|Load from Alpha Channel if necessary. Click on the Background color selection on your Active Colors Panel (the block behind the Foreground color selection) . A swatch dialog box will appear. Choose the lightest grey color from the swatches, then adjust it to an even paler gray. Click OK. Now, with the skin area selected and your pale grey as the secondary color selection, hit DELETE on your keyboard. The selected area should be pale grey.
5. Select the Airbrush tool and set the pressure to 70%. Choose a medium grey color from the Swatch palette. Carefully use the airbrush to shade in the skin areas, using the shading from the layer below (visible since the current layer is set to 65% transparency) as a guide. Zoom in and change brush sizes as necessary to work on detailed areas. PSP: Set the Airbrush tool to Shape: Round, Hardness: 0 and Opacity: 40. Brush Size will vary. All other settings: 100
6. Select a dark grey, nearly black color from the palette. Use this color with the Airbrush tool on the darkest areas of the skin. Don't worry if there are obvious lines of color gradation visible.
7. Switch back to the Blur tool (PSP: Retouch with prior Soften settings) now and carefully smooth out the selected area until the transitions between the 3 different grey tones are no longer sharp. Again, watch out for the nose and other detail areas.
8. (Optional) For an even more realistic look, use the Burn (darken) and Dodge (lighten) tools to darken the shadows (below the jaw, shadowed side of face and body) or create bright highlights (cheekbones, chin, etc). Soften the image again with the Blur tool if necessary.
PSP: The Retouch tool is used for all three of these functions. (See table below for PSP settings.)
Mode
Hardness
Opacity
Step
Density
Burn
0
40
1
100
Dodge
0
20
1
20-40
Soften
0
90-100
1
100
9. With the Airbrush layer still selected, click the link box on the Blur 2 layer to link the two layers together. Click Layer|Merge Linked on the menu, or hold down (Ctrl+E) to merge the two layers. You should now have one single layer still named Airbrush. PSP: Hide all layers except Airbrush and Blur 2. Right click on the Airbrush layer to bring up the Layer options menu. Merge|Merge Visible to combine the two layers. The resulting layer will be named Merged. Rename the layer to Airbrush.
Thank you! I´ve been searching for good tutorials a very long time now, and finally i´ve find it! Thank you for not talking in "photo-language", I don´t understand that yet ^^'.
17 Jan 2006
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Thanks so much it works with coral photopaint too and this helped me so much thank you thank you thank you
I just want to say thanks for this - even though I use arcsoft photostudio 5 for my colouring, I still found it useful as it helped me to work out what order to do things in, so thankyou, skins always been the hardest thing for me to colour.
HI! I've wanted to find a simple-looking program tutorial for what seems like years. The last one i tried, I didn't understand right, and I messed up the pic. This one is done so that everyone can understand! And I thank you for taking the time to translate for PSP, for i didn't want to buy a new program if i didn't have to. ^^
In the High School Web Design class that I teach, we use GIMP to do a "colorizing" assignment. I have my students visit this page to get their skin tones right when colorizing. The Photoshop settings work fairly well in GIMP. Thanks for the tutorial. We have all found it very useful.
Thank you so much, you really helped me alot. Ive been trying to learn to color on photoshop on my own for the last few months and this is the first tutorial ive read and i have to say it was very helpful. I decided to redo one of my pictures and its turning out so much better, though i am still working on it. Its nice how versitile psp is once you get used to it. Still learning though...Thanks again!
The collection of art and writing tutorials in the Elfwood Fantasy Art Resource (F.A.R.P.) is a part of Elfwood. The FARP logo was created by Miguel Krippahl (The muscular guy in the FARP-logo) and Thomas F Abrahamsson (The text and general graphic design). Those sections written by volunteers are copyrighted to Thomas Abrahamsson and the respective writer. Elfwood is a project created by Thomas Abrahamsson.
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(use a smaller size soft brush, pressure set to 90-100%) to soften the penciled lines of shading in your drawing. PSP: Use the Retouch tool 
, Retouch Mode=Soften, Paper Texture=None, Opacity 90-100%, Step=1, Hardness=0, Density=100).
4. Make sure the skin area is still selected. If it isn't, go to Select|Load Selection and re-load the "skin" channel. With the skin selected, hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Switch to the Fill tool 
and select a light gray color from your Swatch palette. Fill in all selected areas with the light gray. PSP: Reload the selection with Selections|Load from Alpha Channel if necessary. Click on the Background color selection on your Active Colors Panel (the block behind the Foreground color selection) 
. A swatch dialog box will appear. Choose the lightest grey color from the swatches, then adjust it to an even paler gray. Click OK. Now, with the skin area selected and your pale grey as the secondary color selection, hit DELETE on your keyboard. The selected area should be pale grey.
5. Select the Airbrush tool 
and set the pressure to 70%. Choose a medium grey color from the Swatch palette. Carefully use the airbrush to shade in the skin areas, using the shading from the layer below (visible since the current layer is set to 65% transparency) as a guide. Zoom in and change brush sizes as necessary to work on detailed areas. PSP: Set the Airbrush tool 
to Shape: Round, Hardness: 0 and Opacity: 40. Brush Size will vary. All other settings: 100
6. Select a dark grey, nearly black color from the palette. Use this color with the Airbrush tool on the darkest areas of the skin. Don't worry if there are obvious lines of color gradation visible.
and Dodge (lighten) 
tools to darken the shadows (below the jaw, shadowed side of face and body) or create bright highlights (cheekbones, chin, etc). Soften the image again with the Blur tool 
Lyn
thank you thank you thank you
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