Graphic Challenge: Colouring In Cats

We have had a few sigs where the best of the pics for one cat was in B&W but the others were colour... We can of course make all the pics B&W but colourful sigs are so much more fun.

So this week's Challenge is colour in Abby

This will give you an idea of Abby's colouring:





and this is the B & W pic to work with:

First I cut out Abby using the Magnetic Lasso and pasted it to a new layer on 'normal' setting. Then I went back to the first layer and colourised the background (seen as we don't know what colour Karen has, you can just pick one ).

Then from the second layer with just Abby, I cut out the eyes, the nose and Abby's tag and pasted each of them to their own layers (and named them to help me later).

I then went to hue/saturation and matched the colour to that of Abby's other pics. (For this I opened one in photoshop and used the eyedropper tool to select the best 'all-over' colour, once you click colourise in photoshop, it automatically goes to your selected colour).

I then chose the more grey colour on Abby's pic and did the same on a second layer, setting it to screen at low opacity.

I then 'painted' on her colours using one layer for the greys and another for the browns. I used guassian blur to make them look less harsh and set them to colour style.

I then used hue/saturation --> colourise for her eyes and made the layer style colour, and made a copy of that set on soft light and lowered the opacity until it looked right. I then did the same with her tags and again with her nose (only I didn't make a second layer of her nose as it would look too bright)

Here's mine for Abby. I don't think my version of Photoshop has the colourize ability. I have Photoshop 7.01, and I don't see anywhere where you can colourize. So what I did was cut Ms Abby out, and make her a seperate layer, then I used the variations and made the blanket a cyan colour then I pasted abby badk, and played around with the Colour adjustments. I couldn't get it really acurate, and I didn't have time to paint her colour in. Then I used the lasso tool on each eye and adjusted colour to make her eyes green. I cut out her nose, made it a seperate layer and lightened and pinked her nose. Then flattened the image, then duplicated the layer, made it soft light, Gaussian blurred a little, and that is it.



It's not perfect, but I think it will do.

Here's my efforts....

Really enjoyed having a go at this - learnt A LOT! so thanks!

I basically followed what Icklemiss set out but went for different colours.

You did good

wow these are amazing!

Here is my attempt at Abby, I hadn't done this before and followed Eithne's guidence. It was fun I enjoyed doing this one

I just wanted to say Thank You to Icklemiss for thinking up these challenges and her clear explainations of how to do things

ok - this is beyond my ability!!! First off, where do I find colorize or variations? I can't even figure out how to change the blanket color...

I am using PS 7.0 - is it possible my version is too old to do these things?? I want to figure this out!!!

PS7 shouldn't be to old but I don't have it to check, I took a screenshot, is your hue/saturation menu different?

Go to the hue/saturation menu


and is this colorize box there?


you just click that and move the sliders until you are happy with the colours

Originally Posted by icklemiss21

PS7 shouldn't be to old but I don't have it to check, I took a screenshot, is your hue/saturation menu different?

Go to the hue/saturation menu


and is this colorize box there?


you just click that and move the sliders until you are happy with the colours

Click to expand...

Mine remains greyed out...and my old color choices are shades of gray. hmmmm....

Then you do have it, but when you open the document, you need to change the color mode from grayscale to RGB

got it! Will play tomorrow I learned something new today. Hooray.

I'm glad I stumbled onto this thread. I didn't do the "layer style" or gaussian blur cause I couldn't quite figure it out. It was very fun though!

I decided to play with this one again. I always take the lazy or EZ way out, if I can. Rather than cutting parts of Abby out, I just cut her out. I did everything the same way I did previously but this time I added a bit of cyan, blue, to the too orange version of Abby then highlighted the tag on her collar and made it yellow gold. I then desaturated her colour a bit.