Gradient map recoloring tutorial V.09

[neoworm]

Long promised, finaly here. Photoshop only, but something similar is present also in GIMP.

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[esselfortium]

Excellent tutorial. Gradient map adjustment layers are something I use a whole lot of in texture creation, as they give a lot of power over the exact colors something ends up with, so it's great for resources that are going to be paletted.

[CaptainToenail]

I see, thanks for this

[InsanityBringer]

I knew this feature existed *somewhere*. Thanks for the tutorial, shame I don't have photoshop though.

Time to go fool around in the GIMP, it seems.

[Captain Awesome]

This is AWESOME. I can't wait to give it a test on something. Thanks for posting it.

[neoworm]

If someone have any suggestions how to improve the tutorial, let me know.

Also If there is some tutorial list maybe this should be addes so it wont fall into oblivion.

[Nash]

Does anyone have the original image? I am having so much trouble figuring out how to use gradient maps in a Doom art context.

[Blox]

You can look at some of my shit to figure out how I do it.
It's really, really simple once you have the gradients for it.

[Nash]

So basically you select the pixels you want to "colourize" and make a black and white mask out of it? And the actual gradient is what actually dictates the colour. I know how to make an adjustment layer for gradient maps, but how do I add a selection of pixels as the mask for that gradient?

[Blox]

So basically you select the pixels you want to "colourize" and make a black and white mask out of it? And the actual gradient is what actually dictates the colour. I know how to make an adjustment layer for gradient maps, but how do I add a selection of pixels as the mask for that gradient?

Yeah, that's exactly how they work.
The resulting color depends on the luminosity of the underlying colors mapped onto the gradient with a non-uniform brightness between red (dark), green (bright) and blue (very dark).

Adjustment layers work through a mask - the whiter the pixels of the mask, the more opaque the effect is.

The way you apply it to something is thus exactly as you would normally fill in an area, with the exception that masks get the alternate color (not the current color, and they're swappable with 'x') assigned to them if you erase parts of the mask.
This last bit combined with the little "swappable with 'x'" tidbit I mentioned means that a very handy way of applying a mask is making a selection, making white the alternate color and pressing 'delete' to erase the selection - thus filling it with white. You can also use this to make sure something stays within the alpha of something, since by ctrl-clicking (ctrl+(alt/shift/alt+shift) is also a possibility) a layer your selection is set to the alpha of the layer; after that you do ctrl+shift+i to inverse the selection, make the alternate color black and delete while operating in the mask layer to clear everything outside of the chosen layer(s') alpha.

I often do bullshit like that after manually brushing white onto the mask since I tend to get very distracted by the selection animation.

There's a lot of stupid tricks to learn that I can't just pull out of my head, but once you've learned them it becomes such an amazingly efficient way of doing things that you won't be able to live without it.