HOWTO: Car Colour Change in PS/PSP

[Shude]

Someone recently asked me how to change the colour of a car in a paint package, like Paintshop Pro or Photoshop. There are several different ways to do this, I will detail two ways. I am a PSP user so the instructions will be biased towards that product, although the processes will be the same in other products the tools may have slightly different names.

Here is the car I am going to demonstrate on:

1. The selection method.

This process simply involves the use of the freehand selection tool, which in PSP has an icon that looks like a lassoo. Set to "point to point" in the tool-options applet just left-click around the body of the car until you come back to the same point and right-click. The more points you make the better detailed the shape will be.

You only want to change the colour of the car's paintwork, so now you have to alter the selection so the chrome, lights, glass and any other part that doesn't change colour with the paint avoids getting recoloured too. To do this you have to hold the control key [ctrl] down at the same time as the first left-click of the area to be "de-selected", then just draw around the shapes as before.

Now we can recolour the car! Luckily this car hasn't been painted yet it's just in unfinished bascoat , but in order for the colour to look good we will need to darken and reduce the contrast of the texture. For this we use "Colors, Adjust, Brightness/Contrast" and put -50 for the brightness and -25 for the contrast, these are just some numbers I came up with that ended up working in this instance.

For the colour I decided to use Tealite, so I chose a pixel from a pic of a Tealite w211 using the colour-pipette, somewhere in the middle of the body where it's neither light or dark, and made a note of the details; hue: 150, saturation: 85. You can use any colour you like but I wanted to make it factory-style! Open "Colors, Colorize" and enter the details.

If you right-click somewhere on the picture the selection will vanish and you have the finished car. Looks good doesn't it?

 

[Shude]

2. The clone method.

The clone method basically involves the use of the "clone brush" (or PS equivalent). The first thing you need to do is make a copy of the starting picture and paste it as a new picture. The initial step in changing the colour, as with the selection method, is to darken the texture and alter the contrast. For this we use "Colors, Adjust, Brightness/Contrast" and put -50 for the brightness and -25 for the contrast.

Just like the selection method the colour will be Tealite, Open "Colors, Colorize" and use a hue of 150, saturation of 85.

Now we have a picture of the car with the paint the right colour, but everything else the wrong colour . Choose the clone brush, right-click somewhere on the pic then do not move the mouse, hold down the control [ctrl] key and press the tab button until the start pic appears, and press the left mouse button. It will clone some of the other pic into where you just clicked, choose "Edit, Undo" from the menu or [ctrl]+[z] and you can begin the process of painting the other pic onto this one. You will need to alter the size and opacity of the brush throughout the process for fast-cloning of the large areas and fine work over the detailed sections. This requires some patience and a little time!

Out of the two processes I prefer the latter, because it allows for precision down to the last pixel and you can be a lot more exact about it. If you have a steady hand then it is the one to use. Either way, the result is usually very similar.

Next Tutorial: HOWTO: Swap or resize wheels in PS/PSP

 

[Shude]

The original thread (which you can reply to) is here