Color a Sketch with a Texture in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Color Sketches With Textures in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Color a Sketch with a Texture in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at coloring a sketch using a texture in Photoshop. We're not only going to recolor the texture as we need to, but we're also going to see a really interesting technique for adding dimension to our colored image. As you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs-up. Those recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started coloring an image with a texture in Photoshop. 2. Color Sketches With Textures - Part 1: Before you'll be able to color a scanned image in Photoshop using a texture, you're going to need a scan to use. I'm going to give you the download link for this so that you can use it if you wish. What I've done with this image is I've just isolated the line work onto a separate layer and I've just popped a white filled lab beneath it. Now you can scan and clean up your own images and I have a video showing you how to do that. So I'm going to put that in the class project link as well as the download link for this image. You'll also need a texture. I've opened the texture that I want to use. This is one from Skeletalmess on Flickr. Just going to show you where you can find those textures. This is a site that I got my texture from. It's the Flickr stream of Skeletalmess and this person provides a lot of free to download textures. So we're just going to look for a texture to use. Don't worry about the color because we're going to colorize it as we work. But you're just going to locate a texture that's going to look nice for your image. Click on it to select it and then when it opens in this window, you can go ahead and download it. Now I've already done that. So go to the image that I've downloaded and I've opened it in Photoshop. I'm going to right-click on the background layer, choose duplicate layer and I want to send this to my car image. So I'm just going to choose Copy and then Click OK. Now it appears that the texture is much bigger than my car image. So I'm going to Move tool. I'll press Control or Command T to bring up the transform handles and then Control or Command Zero to show those transformation handles. Now I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag in and just re-size this texture. I can hold the ALT key to just drag in from both sides of this texture and make sure that this snaps in because I really do want this outside edge of the texture to show on my image. So once I've done that, I'll just click the Check mark. I'm going to move the texture to below my car image. Now I'm just going to re-size my car image so I can see things more clearly on the screen. To be able to re-color the car image, I'm going to the line layer and I'm going to select a tool to make a selection with. Now you can use the Magic Wand tool or you could use the Quick Selection Tool it doesn't really matter too much which you use. I've been really careful with this image when I drew it and all my areas here are trapped, so I can just click over that area and it will automatically be selected. If you're using the Magic Wand tool, you want to make sure that Contiguous is selected because that will allow you to select within an area and not just all the transparent areas of the image. Now I actually want to bring up both these fenders. So I'm going to hold Shift as I click on this second fender. So we're looking at coloring these two fenders right now. So I'm going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation. I'll click OK. You can see that the Hue Saturation adjustment has a mask on it already. So that means that anything that we do now is only going to affect these mask areas of the image. So I'm going to click Colorize. I want to color these two sort of formed sort of color. So I can adjust the saturation here, I can adjust the lightness and I can adjust the color that I've chosen. When I'm happy I can just close down that panel. I'm going back to the original line work. I'm going to select over this part of the car. Layer, New Adjustment Layer Hue/Saturation. Click OK and this time I'm going to color this part of the car and I want a sort of brown color. So that's going to be in the sort of orange area. It's going to be pretty dark. Maybe with a little bit more saturation in here. Let's go to the wheel trim here. Again, selecting the line work layer, clicking on the wheels. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation. I want to use a sort of olive green. Finally the tiles themselves. If you don't have trapped there is in your image, you're going to have to work a little bit harder at making your selection, but the process is going to be the same. Once you've made your selection, you can just go ahead and add your Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Make sure to click colorize and then go and get a color to use for that part of the image. Now I've got one more part of this car that I'm going to work on. So I'm going to speed up the video as I do that. We're going to come back in the next video and I'm going show you a couple of things. One, how to thicken these lines and secondly, how we can add a bit of dimension to the texture by adding some lights and some darks to it really easily. 3. Color Sketches With Texture - Part 2: Before we go ahead and thicken up the lines, there are a couple of things I want to show you. One of them is how we would go ahead and re-color the outside edge everywhere we haven't re colored the texture to date. Technically we don't have to use this particular approach, but I want to show you because I think it's a really handy one to know. What I want to do is I want to select all the areas that are already masked. In other words, so that we can then invert the selection and color everything that we haven't already colored. What I'm going to do is hold the "Control" or "Command" key as I click on the thumbnail for this mask, and that selects this first area. I'm going to hold "Control" or "Command and Shift" and click on the next one, and that adds to the selection. I'm just going to click to add each of these individual areas to my selection. Now I have a selection of everything that I've previously recolored. Let's go and choose layer, "New Adjustment Layer Hue/Saturation." I'll click "Okay." You can see here that right now the mask is going to be applied to all the areas that we've already colored. We can easily invert the mask. If you're working in a later version of Photoshop, you can click here on the "Mask Icon" and click "Invert," and that will invert it. If you're working in an earlier version of Photoshop, you can just close down this Hue/Saturation dialog, click on this mask thumbnail and press "Control" or "Command I" to invert the selection. Double-click on the thumbnail for the Hue/Saturation adjustment, and now you can colorize it. I'm just going to quickly do this. We can also thicken the lines if we wish to. If your lines are a little bit flaky and need to be thickened up just a little bit, this is how to do it. You're going to click on the lines layer and choose "Filter " "Other" "Minimum." What this allows you to do is to set the minimum line weight and I've just increase the radius to one. It's very, very small increase but it's thickened up all these lines really nicely. There's the before and here's the after. I think it's a much better look to this image. I'll click, "Okay." Let's look and see how we would add some dimension to this image. I'm going to the very topmost layer up here. I'm going to add a new fill layer, "Layer," "New Fill Layer, " and it's going to be a "Solid Color Layer". I'll click, "Okay." I'm going to fill it with 50 percent gray. That's somewhere over here, and it's red, green, and blue values are all 128. I can actually type those in. I'll click, "Okay." This is neutral gray. For this layer, I'm going to the blend modes, I'm going to set it to the soft light blend mode. The result should be absolutely nothing. Nothing has happened to this image by doing that, putting a 50 percent gray fill layer on top of the image and setting it to Soft Light blend mode, nothing happens. I'm going to right-click on this layer and I'm just going to rasterize it, so it's just a raster layer. Now I'm going to the Dodge and Burn tools and they're over here. Dodge makes things lighter, Burn makes things darker. I'm going to start with the Burn tool. I've got a pretty large brush here for the Burn tool and a high exposure. You probably would never use an exposure like this in regular dodging and burning, but it's fine for this purpose. My exposure is 42 percent, somewhere around. That's perfect and I'm using mid-tones, so this is set to mid tones. What I want to do is to start darkening this area of the car. But it would be useful for me if I didn't have to be too careful about how I went about it. What I'm going to do is go back to my line layer. Again, I'm going back to my magic wand tool, making sure I'm set to contiguous and I'm clicking on this area of the car so I'm isolating this area. Now I'm going up here to the layer that I'm actually going to work on. Because I've got the marching end showing, now when I go ahead and dodge or burn this layer, I'm only allowed to paint in this area. If I paint out here, nothing happens. If I paint just over the edge, then only the area inside this selection is actually being affected. Ergo, I don't have to be too careful in painting. Like anything that is going to help me do something fast, but without a lot of effort. I'm just going around the outside edge of this texture area and just burning it in a little bit, just darkening it a little bit. Going to adjust my brush. This is a regular brush in Photoshop so you can adjust its size using the open and closed square bracket case. I've now darkened that part of the image all the way around the selection. Now I'm going to go to the Dodge Tool and this lightens things. Again, I'm on mid tones. Again, I've got a really high exposure value. This is a different brush, so I'm just going to make sure it's sized correctly. Now, I'm just going to paint in the areas that I want to lighten just a little bit in this texture. Once I've done that, I'll press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect my selection. This is the before and this is the after. Using this dodge and burn technique, you can add quite a bit of dimension to your textured colored image. Let's go ahead and do the fenders back to the layer that has the line work on it. Back to the magic wand or the Quick Selection Tool, click in this area, Shift-click over here. You've got both these areas selected. Go back up to your gray filled layer, go back up to the Burn tool. Then we can start darkening this area just around the edge of the texture. You may or may not need to lighten this just depending on what color you've used already. See, I can work with quite a large brush here, it's quite a soft brush, but this is allowing me to just paint over the marching ants and only the area inside the selection is actually being affected by my paint job. Let's go to the Dodge Tool. Just going to click a few times to just lighten this area. "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection back to the line layer, back to your selection tool, select the areas you want to affect. Shift-click on the second area, back to your gray filled layer, and then back to your Dodge and Burn tools. The words Dodge and Burn have a history in an old film process. This has got to do with creating prints from negatives and dodging and burning was a way that processes used to lighten and darken areas of the image. That's why these tools are called Dodge and Burn. "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. Let's go and see the effect of our dodging and burning here. That's the original textured image. This is the textured image with the dodging and burning added to it. Your project for this class is going to be to do just this. Either take the image that I've given you or take a scanned, cleaned up image of your own and add a texture to it, and then re-color that texture over the image. Finally add some dimension to your effect using a Dodge and Burn layer, making sure that of course that you've used a 128, 128, 128 neutral gray and that you've blended it using soft light. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about coloring a scan line image using textures in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.