˳ᴗ ᴗ) COLOR CORRECTION TUT˳
(PSD used is my own; IbisPaint coloring is my own. Here is the original image for reference.)
Have you ever tried to put an image under a PSD, only for it to turn out like...
...this?
There's a reason that happens, and a way to fix it.
WHY DOES HE LOOK LIKE... THAT?
For those who don't know much about art, the original image is actually very heavy on red; Ivan's "white" shirt and "white" scleras are actually pink, his hair is highlighted in dark grey instead of the usual blue or cyan, and so forth. His skin is even the hexcode #E25969.
So why does the image look less red than it actually is? Well, the reason Ivan looks as though he's under dim, dramatic lighting and not like he's... well, sunburnt is because of color theory.
And while that's all fine and well in art, because it looks normal and cohesive in the actual art piece, it makes it really hard to edit. This is when color correction comes in.
WHAT IS COLOR CORRECTION, SIN?
I'm so glad you asked.
I'll try and keep this brief: color correction, as used in photo editing communities, is the process of correcting an image so that it's colors look more "normal." This can include making a super dark image have normal contrast, a super blue image less blue, a super desaturated image have saturated colors, etc.
In fact, you'll often see this in gifsets. Here's a post about it.
OKAY... HOW DO I MAKE HIM NOT SO RED?
Before you do anything, figure out what's going wrong when you edit your image. Is it too much of one color? Too dark? Too light?
Thankfully, we have already identified the problem with the art piece of Ivan. He's super red.
Now, we can solve this in both Photopea and Ibispaint. First, I'll tell you how to do it in Photopea.
PHOTOPEA
To color correct an image with too much of one color, you want to neutralize it. And to do this in Photopea, you're mainly going to want to use selective color layers and color balance layers. First, let's apply a color balance layer and turn down the red. Here are my settings, and how the image turned out:
Already, our image looks so much better. But Ivan still looks a bit... pink and dark, doesn't he? And now the black is a bit brighter, too. To counteract this, I'm going to use a selective color layer to darken the dark colors and add cyan and yellow to the red.
Just two layers and it looks nearly normal! Wasn't that easy?
Now, you can stop here. However, I wouldn't recommend it. See, because the image was so heavy on red, we had to neutralize it a lot. This resulted in those hearts turning magenta instead of red. He's also still pretty dark, and his shirt looks really cyan, which I don't want.
So, using another selective color layer: let's turn down the cyan, turn down the blue, add some yellow to our magenta and red, and brighten our whites. Then, I'll add a brightness and contrast layer.
Just look at the difference! I'd say I'm about done.
When we put it under the same PSD now, I get...
...this! It looks so much nicer, doesn't it?
IBISPAINT
First, I'll make a coloring so that, like with the photopea version, I can show you the difference in how the image will look when edited. Here's the coloring, and how it looks applied to the original image:
Um... It's not the literal worst thing in the world, I guess.
Now, in IbisPaint, the premise is more or less the same; you want to neutralize the color. It's just that the way you go about it is different. That doesn't necessarily mean it's hard, though. In fact, before I used Photopea, I used only IbisPaint to correct my images!
First, I'm going to put the original image in a folder. Then, I will colorpick from Ivan's skin and color a layer with that color. After that, I will invert the layer and set it to soft light. Here's what that looks like:
It's still pretty dark and pretty red, but that's a pretty drastic change! It's still not enough yet, though. Let's add another layer, color it with white, and set that to soft light, too.
Way less red, and way brighter! Maybe a bit too bright.
So, I'm going to be adding a brightness and contrast layer to darken the darker colors and lighten the lighter colors. However, IbisPaint's brightness and contrast filter tends to up saturation. Not to worry; you can just add an HSL layer to desaturate the image.
Again, you can stop here. I personally feel like the image is a bit too yellow, so I'm going to add a blue-grey soft light layer.
The change is a bit subtle, but I feel like it looks a lot better. Now, with the same coloring, here's what the color corrected image looks like:
Voila!
Now, I want to compare what the IbisPaint version looks like compared to the Photopea version.
If you can't tell what the differences are, what I noticed is that it has more contrast, it's less green/cyan, and it's more pink. Though, the reason it's so pink might be because of the blue-grey soft light filter. Overall, it looks pretty similar!
As you can tell, it's a bit harder to manipulate colors in Ibispaint, but you can still get a pretty good result.
