| Classic Colorizing with
Paint Shop Pro
(click on the image to see
a slightly larger view)
| 1 |
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The first
thing you need is either a drawing or a grey scale scan of the image
you want to colorize. I do public domain things and this was
in a book I have so I chose to use it. This was a print in a
very old book copyrighted in the late 1800's. The original
image on was an old kind of yellowed paper you'd associate with a
very old book. I scanned it in grey scale and you can see that scan
below. |
| 2 |
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The second
step is to increase the color depth to 16 million colors. |
| 3 |
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Grey is a very
cold color and although you could start your work from here, I
decided I would like a warmer color to start with so I chose to
start with a sepia tone. I did not use the Sepia tool in Paint
Shop Pro as it didn't give me a warm enough effect so I started with
the colorize menu for the whole image. |
| 4 |
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Below you will
see the settings I used on the color dialog for my base color. |
| 5 |
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Now that we
have a warm color it appears a little too bright for me for the tone
and setting of the image so I will use the built in
Brightness/Contrast function in Paint Shop Pro to correct that. |
| 6 |
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Below you will
see the settings I used to darken my image just a bit with the
Brightness/Contrast function. |
| 7 |
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Now here is
where the fun begins. The preparation of the image is complete. From
here on out we'll be adding color to separate sections of the image
working toward our goal of the final image as it appears at the top
of this tutorial. We'll start by
getting familiar with a couple of tools we'll be using to complete
this image. The first one below is the lasso tool and you'll find it
on your tool palette. |
| 8 |
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We need to set
up the tool to work the way we want. See the screenshot below to
duplicate the settings I have. Smart Edge is the key here in the
Selection Type and be sure also that Feather is set to 0 and that
Antialias is checked. |
| 9 |
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The lasso tool
is very easy to use and accomplishes our task quickly. To use
the tool visually select the start point for your selection. I chose
the top of the drapes and simply clicked once there. Then I moved
around the perimeter of the drapes following the edges and clicking
in many places as I worked around to keep my selection on the
outside edges of the drapes. When I got all the way around I double
clicked to create the full selection as shown below. |
| 10 |
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We'll now go
back to the colorize dialog and add some color to our selection. The
color settings I used are shown below. I did this for all the drapes
in the image consecutively because your settings will stay in the
colorize dialog until you change them. In this way you can get
exactly the same color without having to set the color every time. |
| 11 |
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I did the same
thing with the skin. |
| 12 |
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And you'll
follow the same steps for the rest of the image. Using the lasso
tool and the colorize dialog you will colorize the whole image to
your satisfaction. |
| 13 |
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Sometimes the
lasso tool will either add a little or go too far inside the lines.
Paint Shop Pro has just the tool to fix that. It's called the clone
brush. To use the clone brush you
must first select it in the tool palette. You'll recognize it from
the screenshot below.
To use it, simply place the cursor over
the color you want to clone, preferably something very close to
where you are correcting, right click, and instead of dragging the
brush just click with you left mouse button to create a "dabbing"
effect so you don't smudge the image. You may have to set the brush
size larger or smaller depending on the area you are correcting. You
can do that from the tool options palette. A screenshot of what the
clone brush looks like on the tool palette is below. |
| 14 |
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By using the
clone brush tool you can clean up any little inconsistencies in your
colorizing process. I like to clean up as I go because then I don't
forget where my problem areas are. |
Above you see the partially
completed image and below you will see the completed image plus an image
that was completed and a special effect was applied afterwards. You can
click on either of the images below to see a slightly larger
representation open in another window.
Below is the final image with
a custom user defined effect applied. I'll cover user defined filters in
another tutorial. The instructions for creating the effect below is in
the tutorial manual that can be accessed from the Help menu in Paint
Shop Pro 7.
Colorizing is one of my
favorites past-times in Paint Shop Pro. You can start with a fairly blah
image and end up with something classic without a lot of tedious boring
work.
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