Help with Painting Over Doujinshi/Manga

[Sakunyuusha]

An hour later, and here's my progress in real time. This should let you really be able to tell just how slow (or not slow) I'm going. I feel like I'm going very slowly.


Eye Color:
Btw ... with her eye color, I'm wanting to achieve a Shakugan no Shana "the girl with fire in her eyes" look, but instead all I get is what looks like a cross between an opthalmoscope's view of the retina and a yellowed olive with a fat pimento inside of it. :\ Tips for getting eyes that look like that classic anime fire-eye look?

Blush Color:
Similar thing here. I want to make her blush like you made the last girl blush. And ... I can't do it. >_<

Hair color:
I don't want her hair to be yellow, but I don't want it to be brown or black either. I want it to be a golden color. Like ... well, I lost 30 minutes just trying to find a good picture of what I meant. -.- All I mean is, girls who have hair that is neither blonde nor brown but somewhere in between. And not a dull "dirty blonde" like Jennifer Aniston or something. More like ... when a girl's hair looks like it could actually be made out of fine strands of gold and burnished copper.

Shading:
I was able to to figure out the shading on ルティス's skin courtesy of inoino actually providing the shading for me, but on the tentacle monsters I'm at a loss for what to do. It's clear to me that ルティス is in the dungeon of the castle in the dark, and that the light on the top-right corner of her cell would presumably either be torchlight or else the light from the doorway that lead to the dungeon cell where she now resides permanently. But the thing is ...
(1) There's also a light patch in front of her vagina, which is kind of odd considering that the tentacle monsters should be shielding her vagina from the light from the top-right corner of the cel with their large bodies. And if you say, "Well, maybe there's another light source providing light for her vagina," then my question is how come it doesn't appear to be shining on the tentacle monster on the bottom-right corner? :\ It's just really weird.

(2) If I shade in the top-right tentacle monster's head (since it did have the most dots originally), it looks weird. And even if I don't shade it in, his head still looks too dark given how close it is to her brightly-lit boob. But whenever I try to lighten him up, I mess up. So your tips here would be much appreciated.

Lassoing:
I was wondering if there's a way to auto-grab the transparent space from one layer and have it become the foreground for a new layer. Because I took a lot of time making sure that I used color erase (and not just a white paintbrush) to make her milk white again whenever I accidentally painted over it while doing the skin ...

... and the thing is, I'd really hate to have to re-lasso all of that milk again. >_< It'd be so much easier if I could go to the skin layer (where there's all this empty space on her skin that corresponds to the milk on her breasts and [once I get to them] her legs too) and just tell it, "Hey, you. Erase the skin, but keep the holes that were previously inside of the skin. Good. You're the new milk layer." Or something.

The reason I say this is because it's a bitch modifying her skin color right now and not winding up painting over the milk. >_<

Blurring:
I can't get this to work. @_@ I want to. I know I need to. I know where I need to. But it just ain't working. So I want to ask for help.

For the tentacle monster's scales on their backs -- I think this would be a good time to use the Blur tool to try and get rid of all of those dumb-looking texturing dots and to make it look professional like you did in the last picture. But every time I try, it ends up turning into really hazy purple. :|

For ルティス, I want to soften up the lines around her nipples a bit (because it makes them look a little puffier and more natural) but I don't want to blur up the physical structure of the nipple itself. That's the problem I'm having: every time I try to blur her areola, either it looks retarded if I omit the nipple from the procedure or I include the nipple but the nipple sort of vanishes and she gets a molehill areola with milk coming out of nowhere. :\

 

[guy]

If you're willing to use Photoshop, I also recommend the polygonal lasso tool, as well as the magnetic lasso tool which will automatically trace hard edges.

Another idea inside Photoshop:
- Duplicate your original layer
- Descreen as best you can using a combination of Reduce Noise, Gaussian Blur, and a sharpener, or a 3rd party plugin such as Imagenomic Noiseware Professional
- Apply the Glowing Edges filter (width: 1, edge brightness: 2-3, smoothness: 1), then Invert and use Brightness/Contrast to knock out some of the midtones.

What you'll be left with is a "trace" (pseudo-line art) of the original image, which will make it easier to use a tool like the magnetic lasso. It won't be precise enough to act as a layer mask (for the quick selection tools) since much of the detail is destroyed in descreening, but it's certainly good enough to get all your basic outlines filled in.

Plus if you have CS3 or CS4, you should be sure to take advantage of the Refine Edge dialog to sharpen or add contrast to your selections. Be sure to look on YouTube for video tutorials on what those tools do and how to use them.



And also, YouTube has a number of video tutorials on coloring in scanned B&W manga, so you can also check them out for some ideas.



Edit:
About the hair (and the shading in general), you probably want to go towards something like this:
View attachment 162725

Just a quick and dirty example, but the point is to eventually get rid of all the original black lineart and replace it with darker skintones or darker hair color, then replace all of the screening (dots) with shading.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I don't see your attachment.

Anyway, here is my newest status update. This is the same as last night's but with 90 minutes more of work. Basically I was lassoing out her leather, some more milk, and experimenting with hair and blush colors. (Still not quite right, but the hair looks better/less artificial than before. It's a little bit too orange, but I can't seem to correct it without it either becoming brown or yellow, and I want neither. :\)

Edit: never mind, you edited right before I posted, I see it now.

 

[SdeO]

wow Sakunyuusha, you're really working hard! Kudos to you:bow-pray:

It's taken me 2 to 3 hours to get this much (or rather, this little) done. No idea how you do it in 30 minutes. My right hand is cramped from overuse of the mouse. >_<

a picture like this new one it would take me like one hour or more.

I was wondering if there's a way to auto-grab the transparent space from one layer and have it become the foreground for a new layer. Because I took a lot of time making sure that I used color erase (and not just a white paintbrush) to make her milk white again whenever I accidentally painted over it while doing the skin ...

you have to finish the skin first and then do the milk at the end.
When lassoing, think what's in front of what, in this case, select first the skin (that include the milk, eyes and mouth), and then the hair, clothes, etc.

Blurring: I can't get this to work. @_@ I want to. I know I need to. I know where I need to. But it just ain't working. So I want to ask for help.

We're not quite there yet, first master the foundation for coloring: layers, lassoing, and flat colors.

I just saw your last update.
My advice? Make a new one! To be honest, there's no way you can obtain the results you want at the first try.
I know, it can be very frustrating. I read somewhere that we have like one thousand of shitty drawings or paintings inside us that we need to through out before the good ones come to life. I'm pretty sure that I've made more that 1000 drawings and I still sucks anyway... hope I'm not turning you down, lol.

Another idea inside Photoshop: - Duplicate your original layer - Descreen as best you can using a combination of Reduce Noise, Gaussian Blur, and a sharpener, or a 3rd party plugin such as Imagenomic Noiseware Professional - Apply the Glowing Edges filter (width: 1, edge brightness: 2-3, smoothness: 1), then Invert and use Brightness/Contrast to knock out some of the midtones.

cool advice, and your picture looks very smooth.


P.D: I'm going to download Gimp to see what's the problem with dragging layers.

 

[SdeO]

for some weird reason, in Gimp you need a layer filled with white to work with the line art in multiply mode. (In fact any color is fine, I think.)

see attachment:

 

[Sakunyuusha]

My advice? Make a new one!

I'm a bit confused about this advice.

1. What I lassoed now is not going to be much different from what I would lasso a second, third, or hundredth time because I'm pretty anal retentive and I zoom in to like 800% magnification and click the Lasso tool roughly every 3 to 10 pixels and make a new anchor, i.e. I have a looooooooooooooooooooooooot of line segments for any given lasso'd region.

2. My problems/complaints stem from dissatisfaction with colors, textures (e.g. blurring), etc.

3. #2 and #1 don't overlap.

In other words ... I don't have to start over if I feel the colors suck, right? I mean ... all I have to do is what I've been doing from the very beginning, which is repainting Color A to become Color B if I decide Color B looks better. There's no reason to lasso, re-lasso, and re-re-lasso, right?

 

[Sakunyuusha]

30+ more minutes of work. Adjusted the skin tone to a more reasonable color. Experimented with stuff that I later chose not to keep. Then got to work on the background. I'm only 60% done with it, so don't freak out that certain patches look unnaturally lighter than others. It takes a long time to lasso all of those pockets. Oh, and I also lassoed the vaginal juices (a, coming directly from her vagina, and b, the strand that's on the one tentacle) but I colored them such a pale color of blue that it may be hard to tell I colored them. My hope is to learn how to make liquids look transparent, since I want the vaginal juices to look transparent (and not white or blue) but I want the breast milk to be an opaque white, of course.

 

[SdeO]

sorry for not being clear.

1. What I lassoed now is not going to be much different from what I would lasso a second, third, or hundredth time

it will be very different, with time you'll find you'd been making a lot of unnecessary movements with the mouse (clicks) and finally you'll find your way to make the process less painful.
I'm not saying that you have to re-lasso anything but finish your current picture, and then make a new one, and above all, don't worry if it's not perfect.

2. My problems/complaints stem from dissatisfaction with colors, textures (e.g. blurring), etc.

color is a elusive thing, a color for itself it's less important than a combination of colors, so you have to think first in a scheme color for the whole picture. Like a rule of thumb, try to use as few colors as possible, 4 or 5 are enough.
For the time being, find an illustration whose colors appeals to you and color pick from there, with time all this will be intuitive to you, it's a matter of practice.

My hope is to learn how to make liquids look transparent, since I want the vaginal juices to look transparent (and not white or blue) but I want the breast milk to be an opaque white, of course.

that's pretty easy, just make a new layer (above the skin, obviously), paint the liquids the color you wish and with a soft eraser -low opacity- delete the center of the liquids to make them transparent.

So keep posting, I'll tell you when is the moment to really bring those colors to life.erfectplan:

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Here is the newest version of the picture, plus a new one I'm working on.

Sorry that they're out of order, but the board was being finnicky and I went afk for an hour and my old attachments got deleted so I had to reupload them backwards.

 

[SdeO]

yeah, it have been difficult to browse the forum these days.

About your new picture, maybe you already realize this, but since you had selected the skin already now you just need to make a new layer below and paint the creepy hands with the brush, you don't have to make a perfect selection anymore. (all this only work with the line art in multiply and the rest of the layers in normal mode).

BTW, there's no need of select the blush color of the face, that can be a problem later on.

And about the other one, I think it's time to put color in the shadows with the brush or the lasso if you're more comfortable with that tool. The goal here it's give to your image a fair contrast between the light and shadows.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I took your advice with the newest picture (the one of the nerdy girl who ends up becoming a hentai mangaka herself at the end of the story, but who here is having sex with her little brother in order to help him achieve his dream of becoming a hentai mangaka lol).

I went ahead and:
1. worked up the difference between the shadows and her skin. It's really counter-intuitive to me, but you're absolutely right that the finished product looks much better when the contrast between shadowed skin and illuminated skin is greater. This involved modifying the existing shadow work I'd done for her arms, neck, and legs, and introducing for the first time the shadows to her breasts. I opted to use three different shades of shadow, from lightest to darkest, because I felt it looked unrealistic to shadow in her breasts all one shadow, and so instead I tried my best to artificially (and newbishly) make a shadow gradient just by way of making a Neapolitan ice cream cone. In other words ... darkest below middle below lightest. ^^;

2. I disabled the old blush layer, and then (experimentally; don't worry, I didn't save this change permanently) went ahead and used a salmon red color in Overlay mode on the Line Art layer, and the result is the blush (and tongue) you see here. Both look much more real than before imo.

3. I added a layer for the dude's legs, crotch, and hands and just as you advised I sloppily painted in the dark paint color and saved a ton of time. Thanks! (I did still have to lasso out the difference between his hands and his jacket, but that was a small price to pay!)

4. I finished coloring her hair brown.

Then as far as the real major experimentation went (and why the photo still looks like super-crap XD),

5. I went ahead and started to shade the background in, but I was lazy so I painted over the text bubbles too (strike 1), didn't bother to spruce up or paint over the SFX (strike 2), and made the background look much, MUCH darker than I really want to (strike 3). She and her brother are having sex in his bedroom with the lights on, so the background, dark though it is, is probably supposed to be one of those predominantly-red but with orange and black and white highlights that you see in anime whenever the character has a revelation. Like ... fireworks, if you know what I mean. Maybe I'll just go repaint it real quick. XD

 

[Sakunyuusha]

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.

Btw, obviously I don't want those unsightly red overlappings on her skin. Nor do I want the SFX to be that pink color. I'm strictly, strictly talking about what the dark background looks like when I say that "this is what I want in the end." And to be honest, I'd prefer it if I could get the black streaks to look more black and less black with red painted over them, but I have no idea how to achieve this and achieve the other desire of having the other 90% of the background to indeed look like it has red over it.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Just a quick and dirty example, but the point is to eventually get rid of all the original black lineart and replace it with darker skintones or darker hair color, then replace all of the screening (dots) with shading.

I agree with you about wanting to get rid of that black pixelation, but I don't want the photograph to end up looking line an oil painting, which is what I think it sort of looks like on the right (with the orange streaks through the yellow "hair"-blob). I still want there to be black lines. Just not black dots. :\

 

[Sakunyuusha]

For those of you following the progress of the second inoino picture, here it is but I think I'm ready to retire from it (for now, at least) and try a new adventure. So, keeping tally, our score to date is:

inoino - succubus from Jubaku = unfinished (~60% complete)
EBA - loli kyonyuu = unfinished (abandoned)
inoino - female knight from Sakunyuu Heroines (~90% complete)
[i forget the guy's name] - female valedictorian who becomes a Comiket mangaka = unfinished (about 75%-80% complete)

The first attachment is 07.jpg, and is the 90% complete one I'm talking about.

The second attachment is an experimental version of it which includes attempts at a dungeon's torchlight (not very good , the tentacle monsters look really bad and I can't say Rutys looks excellent either) and attempts at blackening up the text (not very good, unfortunately ).

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I started working on this about 90 minutes ago. I just finished. o_o;; I mean, it may not be 100% done, but it's probably the most done out of any of my projects so far.

It probably helped that there were a lot of straight lines and I was able to implement SdeO's advice pertaining to the girl's skin as well as to the background. It made it really easy to color her skin when I had already lassoed out her hair, eyes, mouth, cape, and leather pants.

Many thanks to Doi Sakazaki. He was once, long ago, one of my all-time favorite artists and remains forever enshrined in my Gold Hall of Fame. He hasn't done much work recently that (a) I've seen, (b) hasn't been futa D: , and (c) has gotten me excited, but that's nothing next to this story. A spin-off of Harry Potter, the story is titled "Harii Hotta to Kinjo no Ushi," a play-on-words of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone ("Harii Potta to Kenja no Ishi"). Here we find Harry and his senpai Miss Hotter (rhymes with "Potter") trying to get a potion working which will power up Miss Hotter's magical abilities. But something goes terribly wrong when Harry gets some semen (which the potion recipe called for) on the cow's skull he found. Harry angers the spirit of a cow-demon-thing that had been inside the skull and it possesses Miss Hotter, turning her into a lactating beauty who refers to Harry as "Onii-tan" and begs him to milk her. Harry figures that the only way to get Hotter-senpai to turn back to normal is to milk her, but it's not quite so simple ...!

I can honestly point to this story and say that this was the first hentai story I remember reading and remember noticing that it had lactation in it but I liked it. So I wouldn't be "Sakunyuusha" today, perhaps, were it not for this story!

 

[HENTAIBEN]

Whoa, I haven't seen this thread in a while. I'm guessing it got moved to this forum sometime ago. Nice work Sakun.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

My third molar on the bottom-right of my mouth is erupting right now so I can't do much except watch anime or doodle. :\ So I figured I'd get started on the next project, since I'm still waiting for feedback for the inoino one (blonde girl in dungeon) and the other one (big boobed brunette w/ red background) and I ripped through the Doi Sakazaki one pretty fast. (I'll need to recolor the cane and stuff and I don't like Harry's clothes' colors but those aren't major deals.)

So here is the climax to one of my favorite transformation (boy becomes a girl) stories. I've got a jpeg of my current status here for you (see attachment), but I did edit the color of the text after saving my project. 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. ^^;

 

[guy]

I agree with you about wanting to get rid of that black pixelation, but I don't want the photograph to end up looking line an oil painting, which is what I think it sort of looks like on the right (with the orange streaks through the yellow "hair"-blob). I still want there to be black lines. Just not black dots. :\

Well for one thing, even a perfectly even/solid-shaded manga will end up with dots once it's run through a printing press. So one thing you can consider is to simply recolor the black dots to something that better matches the surrounding color, as a compromise between redrawing all of the shaded areas and just leaving the black dots as-is.

But I'm not sure if it will necessarily have the same aesthetic as a true print, since most presses screen with a combination of CMYK (eg: if you zoomed in close enough, you'd see separate CMYK dots, but of different sizes/spacing). My hunch is that in some frames it could work, but in other frames the effect probably won't look convincing.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

About CMYK and photoshopping hentai:
I'm not sure I can agree your assertion. I understand what you mean by CMYK printing methods, but every time I've zoomed in on a digital scan of a color page from from a hentai magazine or manga, I have never discovered magenta or cyan mini-dots upon zooming in. Instead, I have discovered a soup of different shades of the color I saw with my naked eye, like tan and gray and black for a darkly-shaded part of a woman's brown hair. Insofar as you might say the original magazine was printed CMYK, I could be inclined to agree ("could" and not "would" only because I am very ignorant about modern-day printers and don't know how commercial hentai is printed). But the thing is, it evidently doesn't matter in the end because we see digital scans of color hentai all the time and those digital scans are, much like these colorizations I've been attempting, devoid of CMYK dots at the microscopic level and are instead dependent upon traditional 256 million color-pixels or (at the most miniature of microscopic but still visible levels) RGB subpixels.

About your dots suggestion:
Now there I could be inclined to very much agree, but I have yet to find a way in which to make the dots (say) orange and keep the hair yellow while following SdeO's advice. I have so far either had to:
1- follow his advice but then lose my original yellow hair color, or
2- disregard his advice (purely for experimental purposes) and make (temporary) alterations to the Line Art layer's color, such that by use of the Multiply-mode paintbrush I can make the dots one color while leaving the hair layer's original color completely unaltered.

If you could propose a way to do implement what you mentioned while still operating under these limitations, I'd be very grateful to hear it: have a minimum of three layers, where the topmost is Line Art (with its layer mode set to Multiply), middle is the sum of all the layers I'm working with (and which mostly, though not entirely, have their layer modes set to Normal; some on occasion are switched to Multiply or to Screen/Overlay), and bottommost is Background (which is painted completely 0/0/0/0 white and has its layer mode set to Normal).

Edit: here, I've produced a image-diagram that should hopefully explain what I mean. Please don't hesitate to correct me / put me in my place if I am incorrect, have misconstrued what you were trying to tell me, etc.

 

[guy]

When I mentioned solids/shades getting broken up into CMYK dots, I was referring to the printed material itself. So the CMYK dots would be there on the paper -- except color prints are almost always high quality (300dpi+, and with manga it's quite easy to achieve 600dpi+), somuchso that the CMYK dots are near impossible to see with the naked eye, and thus there is little/no perceivable CMYK screen pattern artifacting.

What you're talking about is once that 600dpi+ print is taken back into digital format (scanned). Assuming your Berry Works sample comes from a manga that is about B5 in format (6.9×9.8in), that would put its resolution at 160dpi, far below the 300-600dpi range necessary to be able to discern individual CMYK dots. So yes, as you said it technically doesn't matter what printing method was used when talking about a digital scan of a color manga.

Just for a point of reference, here is a portion of a photo from a photobook I have, scanned at 150dpi, alongside a 1200dpi scan of the highlighted crop:
View attachment 163931

Smooth images are quite easily achieved with CMYK screen patterns. The problem is when it comes to B&W images (and really, that's what we're talking about since there's no point for you to recolor color manga scans). When it comes to B&W, one single color (black) has to cover all hues and tones that would make up an otherwise color image. Since there's no such thing as "light black" and "dark black", the only thing a press can do is introduce larger screen patterns to simulate shading.

My point is that these screen patterns are the same as in CMYK printing. They're just more exaggerated (larger dots) in order to make up for the inability to apply various printing techniques (such as overprinting) that would produce perceivably smooth gradiants.

In other words, the "smooth gradients" we see in color scans are in fact CMYK dots that are blended together. So when it comes to coloring in B&W scans, one would expect those dots to go away since the image is no longer dependant on a solitary color. Or conversely, if the dots don't go away (or aren't hidden by some sort of blending trickery), the image appears to be lower quality, since there is somewhat of an aesthetic that associates large/easily-perceivable screen patterns with low quality printing/scanning.