Forum: Photoshop


Subject: Sin City

The_One1 opened this issue on Apr 04, 2005 ยท 10 posts


Hoofdcommissaris posted Tue, 05 April 2005 at 3:13 AM

I have been looking at the material (Jackie Boy is my desktop right now). My best bet is one has to work with Adjustment Layers and maybe even alphachannels. The basis look seems to be a color palette of black, white, red and the colors in-between that result in brownish/reddish skin. And yellow for Yellow Bastard. I would go at it like this: Select the color red, do a 'color range' selection on the picture of your choice. Go to the tab 'channels' (with the selection still active) and click on the little mask icon, the circle in the square. A new alpha channel is made, with white representing the red and black the non-red. You need to work that. Dark tints of red will be partly grey, you have to color correct the channel in a way that the white covers all shades of red in the picture, and the black really is black. You can do everything you want with alpha channels, later we will use this channel to make a selection. Do the same with a 'skin color' I used the brown in front. You can activate the original image 'beneath' the alpha channel, to see which parts you are including or excluding from the picture. Now command-click on the alpha channel of the first selection (red) and choose the 'color tone/saturation (?)' Adjustment Layer and slide the saturation to 0. Because you activated the Adjustment Layer with a selection active, you created a mask in that layer. One of the main reasons to use AL's. You need to invert this mask. The result is that the picture goes black and white, except for the red parts. Now command-click (well, at least on Mac, I am not sure for Windows) on the other alpha channel. We'll use the same adjustment layer as before, but tick the box 'fill with color', and slide the top slider until a nice tint is there. You can paint around in Adjustment Layers mask all you want. That's how I created the dark borders, by using a 'Curves' AL. I made the rain stripes in another alpha channel. I painted white dots, did a large motion blur, sharpened it, did another blur, sharpened it again, and did a little gaussian blur. I command-clicked on the alpha channel and filled a layer with white stripes (nice name for a band) and painted them away in the most important part of the picture. It is good fun to do, and you can use other AL's to come to this result. The reason I do it this way, is because it is all non-destructive.