Coloring Me Softly

So I have took a few screen shots of coloring Assassin gray scale image.Ill try explain how i do it, seems boring just posting finished work.

Firstly i have set overall color of painting using color balance found in Layer > Adjustment Layer > Color Balance.Ive set it to blue and then erased color over character.Not really necessary but it can interfere with skin color...

Using Overlay layer added more color to background. Some warm gray,green for ground and red, purple hue for clouds.If you use 50% gray in overlay layer it wont show at all..Above 50% things go lighter, below 50% things go darker. Top bar in HSB slider is Hue (color), middle bar is Saturation (color intensity) and bottom bar is Brightness (color blackness).

Moving bars to color i wanted for skin and clothes on a different overlay layer. Using another layer for skin and another for clothes allows me to change color easily by locking transparent pixels.

And i did change the color of clothes, brown seemed very dull and uninteresting so i changed it to purple.Added some lighter purple to blend it with overall atmosphere. Using color layer, colored pattern on clothes. Beware of color layer it has tendency to metalize objects giving them high contrast and saturation.Great for metal stuff but bad for skin...At this point i was ok with colors, sort off, so i have merged everything to one layer and from this moment on worked with only background layer and one normal layer on top to clean things up...


So were almost finished now...Using 80-100% opacity hard or soft brush cleaned up color transitions a bit by picking up local color (Eyedropper Tool). Didn't go too far because i wanted to keep painterly drawing kinda thing going on, plus i'm lazy..Added highlights and poped pattern to be more visible using Dodge Tool, fixed clouds a bit...


And tadaa its done (as if painting can ever be actually done, you could draw forever)...Pimped out daggers a bit, they were unworthy of assassin,fixed clouds and added mountains in back to get some depth going, failed there a bit eh...i don't paint scenery a lot, though i should...seems i never get around to it...So that's how i color gray scale, maybe someone will find it helpful, maybe not. Anyhow thank You for reading..