Making OF: A Color Dream

Hi there,
I have been very busy working for clients over the past weeks, sadly I couldn't manage to write a new post because of that. But the job qualifies for a series of posts, but it is too early to say anything about it.
;-)

Today I wanted to demonstrate how you can colourize a picture with the use of (in this case) only three textures and of course with the aid of Photoshop.

Before/After view:

There is a lot of playing around involved if one tries to get a colourful picture with the help of textures. First you need suitable textures, primarily of strong colours that fit your subject and your taste and vision. With the picture in question I first made a selection of textures I liked and whose colours and textures/structures hopefully go well together.

I thought that because of the rather white foggy parts of the picture it would be easier to colorize the image.

I all depends on the blend modes one chooses.

I wanted to have a strong contrasting green against the red autumn leaves. So I chose Pea Soup from the Spring Release pack. With the layer at 100% Multiply the whole white of the fog turned green. To get rid of the green on the leaves I used a layer mask and erased what was too much.

The red parts in the treetops and the stronger red tones of the leaves I achieved with the 2nd texture Pale Rose. To  achieve the red tones I played around with the blend modes. I usually start with a opacity of 50% when trying them out.
In this case "Linear Light" worked best. I wanted to keep the green tones in the middle, so I erased most of the middle part, again by applying a layer mask.

The third texture only slightly changed the red  and yellow tones and wasn't really necessary, but I liked it better than without.

Hopefully you are encouraged to try something similar with one of your photos.

I only concentrated on the colour part of this picture. As you can see the layers reveal a lot more work...

Thanks for reading -

Best wishes,
Dirk

Visit my textures here: TEXTURE PACKS