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Old January 11th, 2011, 12:09 AM   #508
demsal8
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Cool Remake

@visitor99 - this wasn't intended to be a training thread, but I have no objection to providing you with some pointers. There is an obvious size difference between the two pictures. Your colored version is much smaller and therefor not as clear as the b/w. I did two things to your image, first I adjusted the colors to look more natural to me, then I marked it up to show all the potential problems I detected. Two photos of your image below on the first line.

On the marked up photo: My first move is to clean up the image and remove all blemishes. On yours, I found an obvious spot to the left of her ear and another on the lower right of her chin. I'm not certain if the chin item is a mark on the person or on the picture, but I remove it anyway. Note that I do virtually all my work at 4 power magnification to detect problems and to insure that my coloring is accurate. At 4x, I found a number of other blemishes that I cleaned up before coloring. Then I adjusted the density both darkening the lady then darkening the whole image. The last was so the background would take a good color. My final clean up move is to change the image to b/w then back to color. This gets rid of any colors that may already be on the image and leave me a clean palette to work on. The results is the b/w photo 1 on the second line shown below.

There are numerous locations on your picture where color was not applied to locations where it should have been, most noticeably the hair ends but also a missed spot near her right eye. I'm not sure if you colored the bangs (hair hanging over the forehead) because this is very fuzzy. I also found that you did not color the earrings but just went over them with the hair color. The question marks indicated places where you apparently left no color, the background, coat, and sweater.

To color, I started with the skin ignoring the overlap into the hair to wherever I determine the skin disappears. I do not color the eyes or the lips in this move. Next add color to the lips and iris of the eyes. Note that the iris is two colors, a lighter color in the middle with a rim of darker blue, the same as in a regular eye (only done if the photo is large enough). I added a light color to the eyebrows to differentiate them from the skin. I colored the coat a deep shade of blue to make the color show on that dark original, then added a off-yellow to the sweater. Normally I might have left the sweater white, but this is an illustration. Finally I filled in the background with a selected color and ran it into the hair for reasons which will become obvious later. We are now at the stage of photo 2 below.

Coloring hair such as this is a real task. In order to make this look like a real color picture, you must not only color the main body of the hair, but all the strands which intrude into other parts of the image. This step takes a lot of time. First I color the main body of the hair with the selected color. To color the strands, I change my coloring tool to small size and change it to a very transparent density. Then go all around to each strand and color it individually. This is done by going over each strand several times until the desired density of color is obtained. Sometimes I leave a very light color, giving just the impression of the color, and others will require more tracing to make the background color disappear from the area (especially the dark blue coat). The final move is to color the earrings, gold with a white diamond studded heart. Note that coloring hair like this is not just something I did here, I do the same thing in all the images I work on. The finished results is in photo 3.

Let me know if you have any questions, I'm only here to help. There is no need to delete your post, it's fine as it is.


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Last edited by demsal8; January 11th, 2011 at 12:37 AM..
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