In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke shows you how to take your cool many-headed alien and make each of her faces a different color.
What’s that you say? You don’t have a many-headed alien?
Well, you can check out last week’s episode to see how to make one for yourself. But even if you’re not multi-headed being inclined, you can use this trick, using a custom gradient in Photoshop, for any human skin-toned portrait (and probably a few other species as well; rainbow sharks here I come).
The rainbow coloring is provided by a carefully constructed custom gradient inside a gradient adjustment layer.
Which is then tweaked and rescaled so that a different color “lands” on each face. A Hue blend mode allows the luminosity and natural skin properties to interact with the colors of the gradient:
If you’re a member of LinkedIn Learning, Deke’s got an exclusive follow up movie in which you can see how he uses a layer mask to let the original color of the model’s lips shine through for the effect you see up top:
(I also inverted the mask to see what it would look like with gradient lipstick! Not part of Deke’s wackiness, but I thought it looked cool):
Deke’s Techniques, because rainbows are colorful!
Comments
Share your feedback, work, homages, questions, wisecracks, advice, critiques, riffs, derision (within reason), frustrations, and love of all things graphical. Log in (or register) to lend your voice.