Help with Painting Over Doujinshi/Manga

[SdeO]

Hey Sakunyuusha, I'm following with attention all your posts here, just give me time to properly respond to your questions.


On a side note, I've been playing around with Gimp and
its interface is getting on my nerves! :crash:

Otherwise it does everything that Photoshop can do, or so it seems. :attention:

 

[SdeO]

Here's what I'm talking about. I want the background to look like it does in the first picture ("whatiwant.jpg"), but the problem I am having is that I can't get it to look like that without painting on top of the layer called Line Art. if I try to achieve this effect by painting the Darkness layer different colors and setting the layer to different settings (e.g. Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Grain Merge, etc), the best I can get is what you see in the second and third pictures.

obviously I don't want those unsightly red overlappings on her skin.

For the moment, I think the best thing to do is erase the overlappings, you can try this:
leave the background layer above the line art, go to the skin layer, select the skin color with the magic wand (I think it has a different name in gimp) go back to the background layer, hit the delete key to erase the overlappings, deselect and repeat these steps with the hair and the rest of the layers if needed. In the smaller parts, just use the erase tool.

Actually, I'm not sure if this gonna help you, it depends of how you had been arranging the layers...

In my current project, I can't use layers to get the text to look like this. (Not without painfully having to lasso and paint every letter one at a time. -.-) Advice on how to get around this would be much appreciated. ^^;

About the color of the text, you can change it with the "Hue & Saturation" window, but first use the lasso or the magic wand tool to select the text (no need of a perfect selection here, see the attachments). All this do not work if the text is completely black, though... well, in photoshop you can change the blacks with the "colorize" option in the Hue & Saturation dialog, I just don't know how to do it with gimp.

Btw, use this Hue & Saturation thing for any change in the colors of your picture, play with the saturation and lightness options too, it's easy to understand how it works.

 

[SdeO]

I'll give you a couple of ideas for further experimentation, follow these steps and check the attachments:

1. Make a copy of the blonde's pic, and flatten the image.
2. Duplicate the layer and apply a gaussian blur (filter>blur>gaussian blur) then, low the opacity of the layer to give it a kind of anime feel.
3. Flatten the image again, create a new layer in overlay mode and with a soft brush paint in the shadows with dark blue, no need of being precise, just have fun experimenting with the possibilities!
4. Finally, adjust the brightness and contrast of the picture to your own satisfaction.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Alright! Here's what I ended up doing, inspired by SdeO's advice, to wrap up things for the one picture:

1. I cloned the Line Art layer.
2. In the cloned layer, I went ahead and erased everything except for the background textures.
3. I placed the cloned line art layer above every other layer, and I set its layer mode to Normal.
4. I grabbed the paint bucket and the color red.
5. I set the paint bucket to Soft Light (or Overlay, one of the two).
6. I told it to fill the entire layer.
7. And I clicked three times.
8. Deciding it was a bit too bright, I used the Eraser at 20% opacity to soften it (or rather darken it) up a bit.
9. Then I colored in the sound effects, the rest of the guy's sleeve (buttons, wrist-collar), and called it a day.

I tried out SdeO's advice in the second reply but with no luck in either picture. It produced very blurry results (even when I adjusted the blur rate, the pixel radius, and the opacity) and didn't look nearly as Marvel Comics to me as did his excellent job with the EBA picture, which remains my goal to this day -- to take one of these colorized pictures of mine, which look like very well-colored crayon colorings in a child's coloring book, and turn them into what SdeO's done where it looks like Rogue and Gambit from the cover of a friggin' X-Men comic book. :O

 

[SdeO]

and didn't look nearly as Marvel Comics to me as did his excellent job with the EBA picture, which remains my goal to this day -- to take one of these colorized pictures of mine, which look like very well-colored crayon colorings in a child's coloring book, and turn them into what SdeO's done where it looks like Rogue and Gambit from the cover of a friggin' X-Men comic book.

What I did in that picture was:
- flat colors.
- contrast for light and shadow.
- flatten all, duplicate layer and apply gaussian blur filter, reduce opacity of the layer and flatten again.
- new layer in overlay mode for paint in the shadows with dark blue.
- flatten the image again and use the dodge tool for highlights.
and nothing else!
Technically it's a very simple process, all you need now is practice, so be diligent and don't give up.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I owe you a formal update, though I suppose the long silence speaks for itself.

I put the colorization of hentai on hold for a while as I pursued other hobbies and skills I am interested in trying to hone. Things like Go, piano playing, craftsmanship, all sorts of things. Anyway, recently I've decided to get going with one of my major lifelong goals, something I've discussed with you before: to get better at drawing so I can draw my own hentai. I figure it'll take a long time, but I also figure that every hour I spend practicing drawing for myself is an hour better spent than colorizing somebody else's black-and-white drawings.

The results of colorization are very nice. Or at least, they are in a pro's hands. And I would like to reach that level of pro-dom for myself. But for now, I'm putting colorization on the back burner.

But (a) I'm grateful for all the help, (b) I've saved this thread to my computer, and (c) I'm not giving it up! I'm just formally letting you know that it'll probably be a while before I seriously work on this hobby again. Sure, I'll work on it from time to time here or there. But not enough to warrant posting in this thread, I wouldn't think.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

LOL. Believe me when I said what I said. That stated, I got carried away with my drawing project, and began to colorize this bad boy, and ... lol. 2 hours later ...

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Too lazy to make any additional changes. All I did here was darken the skin shadows (by duplicating the original shadow-layer), lighten up the hair a little bit, and apply a selective Gaussian blur of 17-pixel radius @ 50-to-70 (I forget) lambda factor, whatever all that means.