Tutorial: Making Edits of POC

fenris:

I’ve seen a ton of “pastel” edits where the subject is severely whitewashed, and honestly, this needs to stop. That’s why I’ve decided to post a tutorial on how to create that pastel effect without whitewashing any persons of color. It’s really more simple than you’d think! Also, before we get started I’d like to point one thing out: if the lighting in the photo/scene you want to use isn’t allowing you to color without whitewashing, then choose a different scene. Seriously, just don’t do it.

In this tutorial, I’ll be going over both photo edits and gifs. Everything was done on Photoshop CS5.

Part One: Photo Edits

This part’s pretty simple. I’m going to be using this photo of Jin for the purposes of this tutorial. I’ve already created the basic edit in order to speed things up.

As you can see, by lightening the colors with a ‘Curves’ layer, I’ve also washed out Jin’s skin in the process. The fix for this is really easy! I’m going to select the layer mask on the Curves layer, as shown here:

Then I’ll choose the eraser tool and erase everywhere that Jin’s skin is showing to remove the effects of the Curves layer on that area. This is the result:

Pretty easy, right? There’s other ways to do this, including color overlays and Selective Color, but we’ll get into that in the gif portion of this tutorial. I’ll be throwing the next section under a read more since this post might get too long.

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