How to effectively color a black and white painting

MainManiac

I can never seem to do this, all results end up being sort of mono chromatic. Not sure if its my blending mode or what

I mean this in the context of hand painted textures though. Like if I were to pain an entire NPC black and white, whats the best way to color it afterwards?

Jason Young

Depends on the situation, but if I'm colorizing a black and white texture I usually start with gradient maps. That way I can adjust saturation and hue changes throughout the value range as opposed to just overlaying a single color.

Cremuss

Same here, I really have a hard time coloring black&white textures... Any tips would be appriecated

Noors

Paint color and values at the same time

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Noors

Yeah, color mode should be the correct mode. But different values could have different colors, that's where gradient maps could give a base. I know some artists make awesome stuff with separating values from color but i find it pretty hard to recolor afterward. Not that i am any good at painting ^^
you can take a look at this excellent tutorial when he talks about hues for instance.
http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm

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Noors

mmh sometimes i don't follow myself, but what i meant is, for skin for instance, you can't use the same pink for light and dark values or it will look shite,
And that's for a lot of reasons, subsurface, ambient reflection, whatever, i mean, you can't simply add a flat color on a black and white picture and make it look great.

MainManiac

TeriyakiStyle wrote: »

Can you show some images of your results so far?

I haven't really done any recently, I've never saved the ones that I've tried to do it with because they all look bland. I do thing the gradient map helps alot though, at first I tried to do that without it and it was 1000x times harder.

What made me ask this was this video: http://youtu.be/c_GWVez_UHM

During the lecture he mentions he worked with someone at blizzard who textured NPC's and he used black and white first

Noors wrote: »

Paint color and values at the same time

This is what I usually do but part of me thinks itd be a bit faster doing black and white first

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MainManiac

TeriyakiStyle wrote: »

@Frell - I assume the Blizzard guy was pumping out grayscale so the armor and accessories could be toned in the game engine. I'll watch the video though.

He said NPC's I believe, so even ones that don't wear armor

Fingus

The problem with using blending modes on top of a grayscale is that you tend to end up with your color really only changing in value and not hue/temperature.



I prefer to use gradient maps to convert grayscale to color, and work on top of that with non-blending mode layers.

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Chris Krüger

Gil Rimmer shows a great way of doing it in these video's:
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/154/

Sardu

Why not just texture in full color and then greyscale it? (I'm half joking here)

MainManiac

So what im deriving from these picture examples is coloring in black in white is more technical than the traditional method of using color from the start?

Justin Meisse

Sardu wrote: »

Why not just texture in full color and then greyscale it? (I'm half joking here)

yeah, we do that at work with stuff that needs to be tinted. I use the HSB/HSL filter to derive a saturation mask to control the saturation levels in the gradient map. It takes your image and turns the R, G & B channels into Hue Saturation & brightness. I'll try and work up an example over the weekend.

Fingus

Well the advantage to working in black and white first is that you get your contrast and values completely right, whereas if you were to work straight in color it becomes trickier because you have so much other stuff to keep track of. I've seen lots of professional concept artists work like that. Nail the composition and contrast, and then do a colorization pass with blending modes, gradient maps, HSB-Colorize or whatever, and then paint on top of that to correct the hue and temperature shits. And then at the end render the fuck out of it.

Frell, could you post some examples of your work so we can maybe identify the specific issues?

MainManiac

Fingus wrote: »

Frell, could you post some examples of your work so we can maybe identify the specific issues?

I haven't tried this in a very long time, and all my examples were just bland. I don't even know what blending modes to use to make it feel alive (from grayscale)

what made me ask was that video I posted where the guy said he worked at blizzard with someone who did alot of the NPC's for the vanilla game, and he did it in bw first. I remembered that was an option I just didn't think it was viable

MainManiac

I just mean when I'm starting with grayscale I don't know how to add color while keeping the information there on a technical level, not an artistic level

Trying to use overlay or just color just creates this dull mess and I don't know where to go from there. If I collapse it and paint directly over it with color im basically re-painting it


I just feel like if I knew how to do it maybe id be quicker than me painting with color from the start, its worth a shot

MainManiac

perna wrote: »

this has been said a number of times: show us your grayscale.. if you don't, there's absolutely no way to give accurate advice, since there are so many ways to go about doing this

I'm not working on anything related to this right now, I was just curious what the most common method of this is


I think ill just stick to what I'm already doing. I was just curious as to why a professional blizzard artist on WoW would take the grayscale route. I figured I might want to give it a shot in the future so I was going to see what ways you guys would do it :P

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ZacD

I think one of these videos covers this topic, but I cannot find it right away http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL

Noors

This is not so uncommon, lots of concept artists do it, but more for blocking volumes than really finish the b&w then spend double time recoloring it. Gradient maps, masks, different bending mode, repainting, i don't know, w/e makes it look good.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5RvvF3u4p0"]Digital Painting Instructional - Greyscale to Color - YouTube[/ame]

Fireflights

In my experience, trying to apply color over a black and white image has never looked as nice as just painting the entire thing with color from the start. There's a lot of subtle hue shifting and blending required, and it's hard to make that all "look right" without spending a lot of time on it...and I haven't found that it's possible to make it look nice without using some other blending mode in Photoshop besides Hue or Color.

If I ever use this method, it's early on to help nail down my values and general color ideas...but I inevitably will end up painting over it so I can achieve nicer color results. IMO painting over a black and white image can be nice if you need to get a painting done quickly, but it's hard to get a really nice end result that doesn't look monochromatic or "off" in some way.