Colorisation, comments? Options

[vogueXdirge]

I just tried out a colorisation, which is a new thing I'm working on right now!
I followed a tutorial for this one and I'm quite proud of it.
:3

Before:



Colorfied!

[*absinthe*]

Hm. The colors came out really well, but in the After, she looks a lot like a wax figurine to me.

[Gigi]

Hm. The colors came out really well, but in the After, she looks a lot like a wax figurine to me.

She does look really, really fake. I think it's because of the original image though, it's just harder to see in grayscale. It's so fake that it looks like a digital painting or a really mussed up vector.

From a colourization standpoint, though, I think you did a really good job, considering this is your first.

In the future, I would suggest:
- Focusing on creating a realistic skin colour. This is probably the hardest part of colourizing. It's not as easy as creating a new layer, filling the skin with a tan colour and setting that layer to "Color". This is probably my least favourite part of colourizing, but the end result, if successful, looks SO much better with nice skin. You can help this along by constantly referring to actual colour images and see how the skin tone varies among the layers. Soon you'll be able to do it from scratch.
- I find that working with brunettes are easier. Blonde hair is just so, so hard to colourize and have it look realistic. I still can't do it.
- Did you completely desaturate the colour of her eyewhites? I would suggest keeping a low amount of colour in the eyewhites - real human eyewhites aren't completely gray/white, so I find the most natural way to do it is to colourize the skin (including the eyewhites) one colour, then selecting the eyewhites and decreasing (but not eliminating) saturation.
- Experiment with more layer options apart from "Color" - my personal favourites are "Soft Light" "Multiply" or "Color Burn", especially for lips.

Hope I helped, and keep at it. :)