A Guide on making POC-Friendly PSDs, from my own experience.
Before we start, I also recommend canarysage's tutorial, it is much helpful and contains lots of insight.
I am not completely experienced and I may make mistakes here, but I encourage you to point them out so I can fix them. Now, let's begin!
I. Important Keywords
※ PSD stands for Photoshop Document. It is a type of file that saves all the layers of what you are working on so you can open it later. In this case, people make a bunch of color filters and save them as a PSD so others can download and use those color filters.
※ POC, People/Person of Color, in this case refers to characters/people that are not completely white and contain at least an ounce of Melanin.
II. Starting
First, let's get a showcase to test our PSD on. I and others commonly use the one below, made by @/amemcth, as it includes characters of various media. You can refer to their post for more versions.
You may also make one of your own, as long as it contains POC. It important to note that you do not use sprite edits.
Testing your progress on swatches is also important. Here's a swatch down below, it's best you keep another one side-by-side above the PSD folder so you can check what your PSD does
III. What is the Problem?
Here, I have put a two PSDs on the showcase. I need you to take a good look at them and point out the difference, and which one isn't POC friendly.
If you haven't figured it out by now, the first one isn't POC-friendly.
Why? The first one lightens the red far too much. An important tip is that you never saturate the red too much, or make it too light. It gets rid of the brown tones of skin.
How do we fix this? Let's make a new Hue/Saturation layer. You will now see 3 sliders on your screen. Get the 'lightness' slider and reduce it until it seems okay.
If your reds are too BRIGHT/saturated, then get the 'saturation' slider and reduce that, too. If your reds are too ASHY/desaturated, (basically looks too grey) than increase the saturation.
This is what I could salvage of the PSD, using our Hue/Saturation layer. You can also use Selective Color, tick the 'absolute' box, select red, and increase the 'black' slider. But it won't fix the saturation, so it's better you either use both Selective Color & Hue/Sat in pairs, or just Hue/Sat.
Now, Let's take a look at another PSD below.
The problem here, obviously, is that it makes skintones green. ANYTHING that makes skintones a color that is NOT red-brown, is not POC friendly.
How do we fix this? It's better you go through your layers and check which one does this, though it's very likely a Hue/Saturation layer. There's two solutions:
Delete that layer
Adjust that layer by the 'hue' slider, increase or decrease the slider until the skintones are red again.
And thus, we have now fixed the problem.
This problem is very common in PSDs, and I want to make something very important clear:
PSDs changing red to pink or purple are also not POC friendly.
And now, our final problem.
The issue here, is that everything's too bright. This is mostly caused by the following layers: Exposure, Brightness/Contrast, Levels & Curves.
To fix this, we find the layer causing this problem and adjust it accordingly. Or, we delete it.
Another solution, is that we get a Hue/Sat layer, set it to red, and tone the lightness down. This is if you really want to keep the brightness of the PSD without it completely butchering skintones. You can also get a Selective Color layer, tick the 'absolute button', select red, and increase the 'black' slider. I recommend you just delete the layer though, personally.
IV. Other Mistakes
※ Excessive Threshold: When you use too much threshold in your PSDs. This is when you set the slider too high and it makes darker skintones completely pitch-black. To fix this, you set the threshold low enough until on the showcase, not a single character's skin is black.
In some cases, you just can't make it POC friendly no matter how hard you try the methods above. That's okay, you just restart the PSD-making process from scratch. Nothing is too much to ensure your PSDs are accessible and POC-friendly.
If you don't want to change your PSD that much, you can always create an optional POC folder inside that contains adjustments to turn it skintone friendly, when toggled on.
Again, please inform me if there were any mistakes made in here. I am open to suggestions and critique as long as it isn't abrupt harassment, and I am open to learning more and improving this guide as best as I can. I honestly get really upset when I see that there are lots of non-POC-friendly PSDs in this community, and figured I'd take action as we as a whole, genuinely need to become more inclusive with our PSDs.
