How to Use GRADIENT MAPS and LAYER MASKS to color

hi guys welcome to another video today i'm finally going to show you the tutorial on gradient maps and layer masks and some cool things you can do using those tools this is just how i use them and how i work with them sometimes so it's possible that i won't touch on every single functionality and thing you could use them for but um i'm just here to show you my process and how i work and what i've learned so far so hopefully this will be helpful for some of you guys so we are here in clip studio paint but you can also do this kind of thing in photoshop if that's what you are using so what i've decided to kind of show you guys with is this piece of this kind of android character that i made not too long ago i actually painted her in black and white to start out with and then i used a mixture of gradient maps and also just paint over techniques to color her later on but for today i'm just going to show you some cool gradient map stuff i do not have her layer separated out we're just going to work as if yeah she's just flattened one layer because that's the cool thing about what i'm going to show you is say you have a piece that you think is like pretty much done but oh you decide you want to change the color of something you can do that with gradient maps and layer masks and it's pretty cool so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do layer a new correction layer um gradient map right here you can also get to this by clicking at least i think yeah by clicking these three bars up here on the layers panel and new correction layer gradient map so there's a few ways to uh to get this option so click gradient map and what this is going to do is bring up this gradient map panel for you clip studio has some basic gradient maps already in the program for you to use if you want to start from them sometimes i actually really like a lot of these somber shade gradients sometimes i will start with one of these just because i feel like they're kind of nice and then i will adjust up here clip studio also has some other basic ones that can be kind of cool like already it just is pretty interesting to scroll through and play with these as well clip studio if you go to their asset store um you can find tons of gradient maps that people have already made some of well these are crazy um some of them are free some of them are are you have to pay a little bit but all of the ones i have are free and there's even like some skin specific gradient maps so let's pick a base skin color to just start with and we might need to change this as we go but what's happening with this gradient map is it's taking the darks and the lights and it's it's mapping in quotes it's assigning like the darkest color is getting assigned to this color the lightest color is getting assigned this color and so on and so forth throughout the whole map so if i pull it up that makes it all darker which i actually i do want to pull it up because right now this is really getting rid of our since this is so light it's actually getting rid of a lot of our contrast so i do want to make it a little bit darker that looks a little better already actually so you can play with these gradient maps and just get something kind of interesting and the cool thing about using it as an adjustment layer like we have here on top of everything is that i can always go back change my gradient map this is not like a permanent thing if we need to adjust as we go it's easy peasy we just can open this up again by double clicking okay okay so let's just start with this um it's not perfect but i want to show you how to use layer masks because we don't want everything to be this weird like orangey skin color like that's weird so what i'm actually going to do is over here this little white square this is your map or your mask this is your layer mask right now the fact that it is all white means that everything is enabled the color on this layer is getting applied to the whole picture so we actually need to change that what i like to do is use the fill go to transparent and fill it so now what i've done is i've disabled it from the whole layer then i can go back to my color swatch instead of the transparent swatch and i can paint in where i want it to apply and what this is doing is it's creating a mask now you can see over here this little bit of white where i've painted now that is only being applied to where i paint so let's just fill this in let's just fill it in where i want it to all be filled in so i want to fill in her skin here again remember it's not super important that uh i don't have to have the colors exactly right at this point i can always change later if i need to so this is super duper nice if for example you reach the end of a piece and then you realize oh it would actually be say so you have a character who has like a blue shirt on and you realize it would actually work a lot better if this character had like um an orange shirt on so you can use gradient maps to actually change the color without going into all of your layers you could just do it like bam on top of everything um i feel like it's a really handy tool i feel a little bit i use it when i'm feeling lazy you know i don't want to go back in i don't want to dive back into all of my layers and make all of the little adjustments i just want to paint on top of everything and make fast changes which it works pretty nicely and there are a lot of people who use gradient maps as kind of instead of fully coloring their piece they will use it as an adjustment to kind of add more cohesiveness to all of their colors and i will show you how how they do that later on we'll get to that but for now we'll just focus on how you can use it to full on like just change colors where you want to okay so now her skin is colored in and we can literally do basically exactly the same thing with all of the parts that i want to color but the basic steps are i'm going to create same same thing create a gradient map choose the colors and then paint in the mask okay so let's let's just do it and you can uh watch and maybe it will give you a sense of kind of the flow of working this way [Music] [Music] [Music] the orange is actually pretty cool maybe we'll try making her more orange in this in this version let's go let's go so [Music] [Music] see this is the cool thing about using gradient maps is you can really mess around it's challenging in its own way because there's like so many options and trying to find and trying to find one that you really like and that like is cohesive is a challenge i will admit that but um it does let you experiment with the colors and like crazy colors that you wouldn't normally try and so that's why i think it is pretty fun and even if it's not like your standard technique and you don't use it all the time it is a fun thing to play with on occasion [Music] [Music] this scene has suddenly gotten super intense but i kind of like it okay let's go [Music] what i'm doing right here is literally just erasing her body the character from the background's gradient map uh that's why i'm making her back to black and white um just because her own layers her own gradient map layers are turned off this is just the background just the background layer so that i can see where the mask is and how it looks [Music] i actually like her how she looks with a little bit of a lighter hair so back into the hair gradient mask still haven't found a color that i like so let's change it whoa okay i think this i think we're getting somewhere i mean this is a little crazy but like i like it let's go [Music] if you ever want to save a gradient that you've adjusted and made up here all you got to do is when it's up here come down here to create new gradient you can name it orange flat platinum blonde i don't know and then my gradient is saved down here so i can safely click away if i don't want to lose that gradient so now you can see now that the colors are quite different you can see all of the the places where i need to go in and fix my layer mask so if you're still working on some other layers something else you could do rather than painting in these layer masks is you could actually say this is this is a new layer if you have like your character or your hair or whatever on one layer and you click that layer control click it will select that and then you can more easily make a layer mask out of the selection if you want but since i'm working on one layer this is this is what we're doing today folks and i actually really like painting in my layer mask it just feels makes it feel a little more organic to me something else that you can do with your gradient maps that i didn't mention before but is actually a very very handy a handy thing to know is before for all of the gradient maps except for like the one that was on top of everything we were using a just a normal mode normal layer mode but what you can also do if you really like exactly how your values are in your black and white or your original colored version if you're just changing colors what you can do is actually so this is my gradient map sorry let me turn everything off okay so this is my skin gradient map just in a normal layer mode what you can also do if you want to try and maintain more of the even more of the tones from the original version so you'll notice that like it's way more bright down here and way more bright right here than it is in my gradient map what you can play with is instead of a normal layer mode you can go to a color layer mode so what this does is it pulls the exact values the exact tones from underneath and it just slaps this color the gradient map color on top so you'll notice the contrast is a lot more with color mode this is normal this is color so what i think actually looks best i think this is a little bit unnatural a little bit too much what i think looks best is actually to duplicate this layer switch one of them to normal and then just lower the opacity so i get something that's kind of in between i feel like that's pretty uh that feels a little bit nicer to me where i get a little bit more of that contrast from my original image um but also it feels a little bit more natural with the skin colors some places this doesn't work though because if you remember the hair we actually changed it to be a lot more platinum blonde versus what it was in here this this doesn't really feel like a platinum blonde kind of hair so if i try to do color with this one it wouldn't i mean it turns it's not a bad color i mean actually that looks like a very kind of natural and blondish brownish kind of color right but for the platinum blonde it's not uh it doesn't work so like it works in one way but not in the way that i was originally intending so you just have to make your own judgment calls on like where where to use a color layer mode versus a overlay versus a normal versus you know whatever feel free to like scroll through and see how each of these looks with your gradient maps you you might find something super cool be open to experimenting and trying new things all right so now that i've kind of cleaned up now that i've cleaned up the edges of the gradient maps it's kind of final touches right now because i have basically the colors in now it's this color scheme turned out way different from what i normally do so it's kind of interesting i'm not sure if i'm a fan yet but i think it shows how you can really achieve some kind of different and more experimental at least experimental to you results with these gradient maps so what i'm doing here is i may i felt like i wanted her skin to feel a little bit more warm so i made yet another gradient map just by duplicating the one i already had for her skin and then i just adjusted the color of that gradient map and made it an overlay to just kind of pop her skin a little bit more um what i'm doing now is i am just with a soft brush adding a little bit of blush in her cheeks this is totally just paint over stuff it has nothing to do with gradient maps at this point so right now the layer mode is an overlay i'm using a very saturated red for her cheeks lips ears shoulders just to add a little bit more life to this character skin also i really like adding kind of blush tones to skin so that's what i'm doing right here and then taking the opacity down so it's not too too crazy and then on that same layer still adding a little bit of like red pop on top of everything just to try and um yeah doing a little bit of paint over it that's the thing about gradient maps is they could take you a pretty pretty far in the process but i feel like at least for me to get it to all come together there does have to be a bit of paint over on top of everything so that it all looks cohesive so now what i'm going to try and show you is how you can actually use a gradient map on top of everything to try and add a little bit more effects or cohesion cohesion is that the right word to all of your colors um i am trying out some of these crazy ones to see if i can get any of them to work with a soft light layer they're all a bit um maybe too much i think so oh yeah just trying to get them to work but it's something you can do and at the very end of your process if you want to just like mess with the colors a little bit and try and get them all to come together in a more cohesive way and just see if you can get some interesting effects when i do this i usually have the opacity pretty low on this top layer it's supposed to be for me i feel like it should be pretty subtle a pretty subtle bringing together all of the colors so that is basically the process guys gradient maps with layer masks are actually pretty simple i know they seem complicated but once you actually try out the process you'll realize that it's not too difficult at least i hope so so the basic steps are create a new gradient map correction layer step two fill in the layer mask with transparency and then paint in with your color swatch and your brush your preferred brush where you want the gradient map to appear so basically paint in your layer mask step three do that again as many times as you need to depending on how how many elements are in your scene i guess and then do any paint over you have to do at the end and it's it's a process that you have to practice and get used to of course but it is a pretty fun way to experiment with colors so i hope you guys found this helpful thank you so much for watching and of course huge shout out to my wonderful patreon pals who make videos like this possible if you are interested in more tips tutorials process files raw files full res artworks videos time lapses and all kinds of things feel free to check out my patreon i would really appreciate it i hope you have a wonderful week and i will see you next time bye you

Channel: ChrissaBug

Views: 18,421

Keywords: digital art, art, csp, clip studio paint, clip studio, gradient map, gradient, layer masks, layers, digital illustration

Id: ALgSJiXm4SY

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021