Flesh Tone Coloring with Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, from Ice Maidens to Drow

Part 3: Colorizing the Skin

1. Load the skin selection again if necessary. Make sure the Airbrush layer is selected on the Layers palette.
2a. Bring up Photoshop's Colorize function by going to Image|Adjust|Hue/Saturation (or CTRL+U). Check the Colorize box. By changing the values in the Hue, Saturation and Lightness boxes (using the sliders or entering values), you can change the color of the selected area to a variety of values. The order of operations is not important.
2b. (PSP) Go to Colors|Colorize... on the menu (SHIFT+L on the keyboard) to bring up the Colorize function. Because PSP's colorize function only alters Hue and Saturation, PSP users will have to take additional steps to achieve the same color results. In addition to the Colorize function, you may also need to open Brightness/Contrast (menu: Colors|Adjust|Brightness/Contrast or keyboard: SHIFT+B) or Gamma Correction (menu: Colors|Adjust|Gamma Correction or keyboard: SHIFT-G; Link box should be checked). Unless otherwise noted, set unused option values to 0. NOTE: For PSP, the operations MUST be done in the order listed for best results.

Photoshop	Paint Shop Pro	Results
Ice Maiden
Hue: 25 Saturation: 25 Lightness: +43	Hue: 22 Saturation: 38 Gamma Correction: 1.70
Vampire
Hue: 20 Saturation: 14 Lightness: +30	Hue: 20 Saturation: 64 Gamma Correction: 1.70
Fair
Hue: 25 Saturation: 53 Lightness: +5	Hue: 22 Saturation: 139 Gamma Correction: 1.50
Outdoor Tan
Hue: 29 Saturation: 55 Lightness: -13	Brightness: -15 Hue: 23 Saturation: 128
Dark
Hue: 29 Saturation: 35 Lightness: -45 Dodge Tool: *As necessary	Brightness: -50 Hue: 21 Saturation: 100 Gamma Correction: 0.45 Dodge Tool: *As necessary
Drow Elf
Hue: 221 Saturation: 15 Lightness: -35 Dodge Tool: *As necessary	Brightness: -75 Hue: 161 Saturation: 25 Dodge Tool: *As necessary

* Colorizing darker skin tones tends to flatten the image. Going back over the colorized areas with the Dodge tool will bring out the highlights again.

Use the settings in the table above as guidelines for your own work, but don't be afraid to experiment and make your own adjustments. Each figure you draw will be different, but as long as you have a good grayscale foundation, you can achieve any flesh tone you need.

If you found this article helpful or have some other tips to add, please leave a comment below. To see some other examples of colorized work, take a look at my Lothlorien or Zone 47 galleries.

FARP Article Guestbook

Date	Name	Comment
2 Jan 2006	Lyn	Loading... 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	:)(:	Loading... Thanks so much it works with coral photopaint too and this helped me so much thank you thank you thank you
31 Jan 2006	Elinor C. Kettle	Loading... 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.
7 Jul 2006	Tara Mae *Violet witch* Nester	Loading... 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. ^^
7 Oct 2006	Stefany Costello	Loading... I got lost around Step 4, because nothing was happening when I did the whole Fill thing. :-(
24 Apr 2007	Robert Bracey	Loading... I found this tutorial very useful. I am just starting to try and colour directly on the computer and this really helped.
1 May 2007	Gary Lannark	Loading... Awesome tutorial, works well with other things too other than flesh
27 Oct 2007	Dan Eliot	Loading... 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.
2 Nov 2007	Sherri Cecil	Loading... 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!
20 Mar 2008	Celeste 'Saphira' Rigelhof	Loading... wow! thanx! this is very useful!!^_^
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