Expert: LizaL - 5/2/2006

Question
Hi,
I am using C.S. and would like to know how to hand paint or
hand tint in pastel shades, and metalic shades. So far I have
used colour burn to good effect but cannot get the tone I wish.


Answer
Hi Derek,

There are a lot of good techniques for hand tinting. You might be interested in a minimalistic effect, created by converting a color image to grayscale through desaturation, then using the History Brush.

-- Open your color image, desaturate it (the Desaturate command is found under the Image pulldown menu, and the Adjustments subment) , and then paint back in the color, using the History Brush. Like this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/handtint.mov

Note that I also created a layer above the background layer, and that's the layer I actually worked on. The reason for this is so I could go back and reduce the opacity of that layer, making it look a little more aged, and hand-tinted.

-- Here's a tutorial I found for hand-tinting grayscale images -- it's a little exacting, since you have to create and edit masks. But it's effective:
http://www.dpandi.com/howtos/handcolor/

-- This is sort of what I did, although it involves actually painting with the Brush tool, as opposed to the History Brush (since my image was originally color):
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/hand_coloring/index.html


-- As far as painting with metallic shades, that's not something I ever have a need to do, so I found a tutorial that explains it fairly well -- it's showing how to achieve a metallic foil look:
http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/2003/09_sep/tutorials/psfoil030908.htm

-- Also, here's a link to a whole site of "effects" tutorials -- among them several ways of creating metallic type and textures.
http://home.zonnet.nl/epragt/tutorials/photoshop/index.jsp.htm

Hope this helps!

Lisa