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Let's go from drab: 
to FAB! 
We're using Adobe Photoshop CS3 for today's excursion :|b
Step 1:
Man, the lighting in the Dissidia opening sucks ass. I can't see shit. Let's fix that by creating a new Adjustment Layer > Curves:
I pulled up on the RGB channel to brighten the over all image, and then used the Green channel to ever-so-slightly decrease the amount of green and therefore add more magenta. (A nice technical discussion of Curves can be found here. Just plain fooling around with it helps a lot, though!)
Now he looks all washed out. Let's create yet another new Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and crank the saturation to +40:
Goddammit now he has blue hair. We can fix that.
Break out ye olde polygonal lasso and make a selection around his fabulous tresses:
Now we create a new Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and
Photoshop automatically makes our selection into a Layer Mask. That means whatever we do is only going to show up in the portions which are whited out. Let's desaturate our selection by 55:
Still looking a little blue. I don't want Kuja's hair to be entirely desaturated, because if memory serves, it is a touch purple. Again, we can fix this! create New Adjustment Layer > Curves and when the dialogue box pops up, check the ticky box next to Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask (if you forget to do this, you can fix this by selecting the layer and hitting Ctrl+Alt+G on your keyboard). We don't have to make a new layer mask for his hair because the clipping mask is only going to affect the layer beneath it. So we play with the contrast in the RGB channel, then reduce the amount of Green ever so slightly and add a dash of Red:
Looking better.
Let's move onto his ... shirt? Jacket? Shrug? Manisole? Oh Kuja, you silly diva. ANYWAY. Same idea as before, select the area we want to color, create new Adjustment Layer > Curves and futz with the color channels until we get something nice and purple:
You can see where this is going. Select element, create new adjustment layer. Rinse, repeat. Eventually we get to something we like, Duplicate Background, set that to Overlay then go to Filter > High Pass as an alternate way to sharpen. And this is our final result:
Other examples:
→ 
→ 
→ 
* Actually I had to use a gradient map adjustment layer to recolor Garnet's face for this one. I'm still learning the ins and outs of getting that to work reliably.
I've also uploaded the .psd for the Kuja icon here. Feel free to take it and abuse it in any way you wish.
to FAB! We're using Adobe Photoshop CS3 for today's excursion :|b
Step 1:
Man, the lighting in the Dissidia opening sucks ass. I can't see shit. Let's fix that by creating a new Adjustment Layer > Curves:
I pulled up on the RGB channel to brighten the over all image, and then used the Green channel to ever-so-slightly decrease the amount of green and therefore add more magenta. (A nice technical discussion of Curves can be found here. Just plain fooling around with it helps a lot, though!)
Now he looks all washed out. Let's create yet another new Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and crank the saturation to +40:
Goddammit now he has blue hair. We can fix that.
Break out ye olde polygonal lasso and make a selection around his fabulous tresses:
Now we create a new Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation and
Photoshop automatically makes our selection into a Layer Mask. That means whatever we do is only going to show up in the portions which are whited out. Let's desaturate our selection by 55:
Still looking a little blue. I don't want Kuja's hair to be entirely desaturated, because if memory serves, it is a touch purple. Again, we can fix this! create New Adjustment Layer > Curves and when the dialogue box pops up, check the ticky box next to Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask (if you forget to do this, you can fix this by selecting the layer and hitting Ctrl+Alt+G on your keyboard). We don't have to make a new layer mask for his hair because the clipping mask is only going to affect the layer beneath it. So we play with the contrast in the RGB channel, then reduce the amount of Green ever so slightly and add a dash of Red:
Looking better.
Let's move onto his ... shirt? Jacket? Shrug? Manisole? Oh Kuja, you silly diva. ANYWAY. Same idea as before, select the area we want to color, create new Adjustment Layer > Curves and futz with the color channels until we get something nice and purple:
You can see where this is going. Select element, create new adjustment layer. Rinse, repeat. Eventually we get to something we like, Duplicate Background, set that to Overlay then go to Filter > High Pass as an alternate way to sharpen. And this is our final result:
Other examples:
→ → → * Actually I had to use a gradient map adjustment layer to recolor Garnet's face for this one. I'm still learning the ins and outs of getting that to work reliably.I've also uploaded the .psd for the Kuja icon here. Feel free to take it and abuse it in any way you wish.
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