Antea's Avatar Colorizing Tutorial (reposted with perm.)

Author: * Laurels Curius - 1 Post on this thread out of 2,713 Posts sitewide.
Date: Feb 20, 2004 - 04:54

This post was originally posted here in the old Body Building 101 thread by Antea Xanthippos: Colorize it!

I've had to omit the css style tags, something was going wrong and you couldn't click on her name or a few other things. This tutorial is reposted with permission. If you take this tutorial and make something from it, post it in the discussion thread for some show and tell!

Give an avatar a new look by "colorizing" it.

Colorizing applies Hue(color) and Saturation(color intensity) values to the full image or part of it. It accounts for light and dark spots in the image so you don't have to. This tutorial will demonstrate how to turn Cornellia's dress green using PSP 7.0 and Adobe Photoshop 5.5

Cornellia is a transparent gif, er, that is to say her avatar is. Because of this, tutorial steps are incuded to change the image to 'true color', i.e. 16 million colors, then step it back down to 256 colors for returning it to transparent gif format.

Adobe Step By Step screen shots Paint Shop Pro Step by Step screen shots
Each link opens a sized window displaying one screen shot at a time. Average file size is 50K.

The basic steps, regardless of what software you use are:

A. Make a copy of the image you are working on, work with the copy.
B. Change the image to true color.
PSP:
Select: Colors Pulldown Menu > Increase Color Depth > 16million
Adobe:
Select Image Pulldown Menu > Mode > RGB Color

C. Select the area you want to colorize and colorize it (this process is different between programs)
Adobe:
1. Use the polygon lasso tool from the tool palette and click around Cornellia's dress
2. Select the Image pulldown menu > Adjust > Hue/Saturation
3. Click the checkbox labeled Colorize at the bottom of the dialog
4. Adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness slider controls. Click the OK button in the dialog when you are done.
5. Select the Image pulldown menu > Mode > Indexed Color. For palette choose Selective. Click OK to close the dialog.

PSP:
1. Use the lasso tool, from the left toolbar, with Point to Point Selected in the tool palette. Click around Cornellia's dress.
2. Select the Edit Pulldown Menu > Cut
3. Select the Edit Pulldown Menu > Paste > As New Layer
4. Use the move tool and move the dress to the correct location
5. Select the Colors Pulldown Menu > Colorize
6. Move the Hue and Saturation colors sliders to make changes. Click the eye button in the colorize dialog to toggle the color preview on and off the image.

Make the background transparent :

Adobe:
This step assumes the background around Cornellia and her dress is a solid color not used as part of her or her dress.
1. Select the File pulldown menu > Export > Gif89a Export. A dialog opens. Click over the background color with the eyedropper tool in the dialog to set the color that will be defined as transparent in the color palette saved with the image. Click OK to open the File > Save dialog. Save the image as a .gif file.

PSP:
This step assumes the background around Cornellia and her dress is a solid color not used as part of her or her dress.
1. Select the Colors Pulldown Menu > Set Palette Transparency
2. Select the dialog radio button > Set the transparency value to palette entry. While the dialog is open, move the mouse over the image. The cursor changes to an eyedropper showing the RGB values for the color that it passes over. Click over the background color to set the color that will be defined as transparent in the color palette saved with the image. Click OK in the Set Palette Transparency dialog.
3. Select the Colors Pulldown Menu > View Palette Transparency
4. Save the image as a .gif file