Paint onto a new layer having set its blend mode to "color". That’s your starting point.
Collin.
Just created a new layer. Set layer to ‘color’, but when applying paint,line, anything, it doesnt show on the layer although it IS showing in the layer preview window, but not on the actuall full size layer.
Everythings set to 100% oppacity as well. Ideas maybe?
Sorry, it’s late [for me], but what do you mean by:
layer preview window
?
Is your image mode set to RGB?
In the layer window, where you can see the layers. In the new layer in that preview window, you can see the paint or change but you cant see it on the main big layer.
No, its set to CMYK. Is that my problem?
Also half of my filters are greyed out.
Thanks so much Collin
You won’t see anything on that light background if you paint in color mode. Try this to show you why: Just pain the entire layer with the blend mode set to color. You’ll see the darker parts of the car change color but the white areas won’t change at all. IOW, painting with color mode over white gives you nothing.
Try to use a few of the other modes as well as reducing the opacity and perhaps a bit of blur. There’s no set way to do this, so experiment.
Bob
I’m no expert, but I managed to easily paint a beautiful race car.
Select the entire car with the magic wand set to 32 then using the quick mask, cleane what is left unselectted. Then, with Hue & Saturation set to colorize, play with the settings. I had to reduce the brillance and increase the saturation some. Then select the color with the hue setting.
It worked for me.
Phil
Here’s a couple things to try:
1) Create a mask that isolates the car from the background. This is for convenience, so you can color freely and the color will stay in the car area and not spill out into the background. To do this, you can use Select->Color Range, select the background (I used a Fuzziness value of 120). Create a new layer, and add a layer mask. It should automatically fill in the selected area.
Then go to the channels pallete, and click on the layer mask channel to make it visible. Invert the mask (Ctrl+I); you want the inside of the car area unmasked, and the background area masked (which will show as bright red). At this point, you may want to also mask the wheels, because they seem to be the right color already. You can use the circular marquee tool, and select the two wheels and fill them. You can also use the rectangular marquee to fill in the small line beneath the car. Usually at this point you would use Levels to increase the contrast, but in this case it didn’t really need it. Blur the mask a bit (I used Gaussian Blur with a setting of 1 pixel).
2) Go back to the layers palette, and click on the layer thumbnail area of the new layer (this will make sure that you are working on the layer and not the mask, and also turn off the mask visibility so you don’t see that red color). Now you can color in this layer and it won’t go outside the lines. Try the multiply blending mode; this will give you color and also retain the black lines inside the car.
You can experiment from here; use several layers with different blending modes, put the highlight and shadows on different layers, play with opacities, etc.
Glen, I said that I am no expert so I would like to know what’s wrong with the method I used, I would realy want to know. I do not criticise your way of doing it. Sincerely.
Phil
Hi Phil,
Nothing wrong with your method, just a different approach on my part. One thing about Photoshop is that there are several ways to do any one task and they’re all the correct way if it achieves the look you want 🙂
In this case, I didn’t try the magic wand, because I saw that the background was a solid color that was clearly different from the car, so it provided an easy way to isolate the car. The car was mostly white but had black lines inside, so I was hesitant to use that as a selection basis because I could see that it would require some clean up of the black lines (not a big deal in this case, but maybe so in a more complex picture).
In general, it’s good to work with adjustment layers. From what you described I’m not sure if you did the Hue/Sat adjustment directly on the car; doing it on a adjustment layer just gives you more flexibility to change it later. BTW, this is where the mask becomes important; you only want to affect the car portion.
Another thing is that the Hue/Sat will uniformly colorize the car. If you want to add shadows and highlights, it might be easier to just use the airbrush and paint them in on new layers set to different blending modes (multiply works well in this case). This way you can give it a more 3d look and also incorporate lots of colors if desired. Again, the idea is flexibility; you can easily go back, change colors, strengthen highlights, adjust opacity, whatever.
Thanks Glen, that makes sense, but the Hue & Saturation takes care of the shadows and highlith if you set it to colorize. Besides, the black lines are so dark that they stay black even after colorizing.
Phil
