I work a lot with adjustment layers. The three main adjustment layers are
Hue/Saturation,
Brightness/Contrast and
Vibrance. Not so often i use Curves and Levels.
The adjustmentlayers are always clipped to a selection. This means the selection defines the area that is affected. What is important is that the selection is
featherd: This means the edges of the selection are like a gradient, there is, or more precise there should'nt be a hard edge.
A good way to achieve this is to set the the "
feather" value to
2 - 8 pixels depending on the actual size of the ship. For frigates it's almost not necessary.
A good way to get a precise and by the same time organic selection is color range. You can find this under
Select/Color Range.... What i mean by organic is the effect that color range selects similar colors, and by doing that you even get the colors selected that are reflected on the image. The recoloring gets a more realistic feeling that way. Set the fuzzines of the color range selection to 2 - 8 depending of the size. This is more or less the same as feather.
The actual selection i do first is a inversed one. This means i select the colors i dont want to be changed, like engine parts, bulheads, weapon mounts etc. If the selection is done simply reverse it with
Strg-Shift-i.
The Saturation mask is first, and just by dragging the Hue/Saturation marker slightly to the left i get something like this.
Now i add a
Brightness/Contrast layer. But the selection is gone. To get my selection back i Strg-Click on the layer mask thumbnail. This way i can later on if needed always add and or subtract different selection to or from each other if i have a more complex recoloring in mind.
When i am done with Brightness/Contrast adjustment i have something like this.
The final touch up i will achive if i go back to my
Hue/Saturation mask and play around with the
Blending options. I simply double click on the adjustment layer on the left. And there we have it, right in front of us, under
Advanced Bledning on the bottom there is something called
Blend if: This will make the blending even more subtle and organic. I mostly use the second slider on the bottom that says Underlying Layer. always slide the marker with alt pressed as it will blend the layers more smooth and will end up in much more better results. It will blend the two layers, the original color and the new adjusted color together, this only works correct if the underlying color is some what similar to the changed color. in this example it works fine. You can always blend diffent adjustment layers together if you want to have a good looking natural colorblend. When i am done with blending i have something like this.
I call it a day here, what i missed doing, the final touches would be substract parts like the color of the windows on the spaceship, or shadows on diffent parts of the ship from the selection. I will include that in the second part when i explain my way of multicolor recoloring
