The Good Designs

Sometimes, you’ll find a great image that just isn’t the right color. Blue can be a hard one to get rid of. Here’s a quick and easy tutorial that can help!

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in 12 steps with Photoshop CS2. Can be easily translated, semi-Newbies to Advanced.

	Step 1: I chose this image of Claire from Lost. I’ve cropped it already, obviously.
	Step 2: The first thing I usually do with all my icons is work with the levels, which is like working with the brightness and contrast, but gives you more flexibility. Duplicate your base, Sharpen it once (Filter-Sharpen-Sharpen) then open up the Levels pallette (Image-Adjustments-Levels). Play around with your base until you find something you like. Here, I only darkened the image a bit.
	Step 3: She’s looking a little old, so I duplicated the newly edited layer and smoothed out her skin with the blur tool. It’s barely noticable here, but you’d notice it later.
	Step 4: I duplicated the blurred skin layer and set the mode to Soft Light, Opacity 100%.
	Step 5: The blues are a little too bright for my taste, so I duplicate the blurred skin layer again and blurred it (Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur, set to 2.0). Then, I erased most of what covered her skin (it doesn’t have to be perfect) and set the layer to Linear Burn, Opacity 38%.
	Step 6: Select the entire icon, Copy-Merged, and paste the whole thing onto a new layer. I then duplicated it. Now, I mess with the saturation a tiny bit (Image-Adjustments-Hue/Saturation, lower the saturation to -25).
	Step 7: Too much yellow and green, so I duplicated the desaturated layer and opened up the Color Balance pallette (Image-Adjustments-Color Balance). In Midtones, I upped the blues, cyans, and magentas. Highlights upped the reds and magentas, while Shadows played up the blues and cyans.
	Step 8: After all that work, I dupliacted the colored layer, and opened the Hue/Saturation panel again, this time lowering the saturation to -42.
	Step 8: I duplicated the desaturated layer, and desaturated it (Image-Adjustments-Desaturate). I also played with the Levels quite a bit to make it more contrast-y. I set this layer to Multiply, Opacity 36%.
	Step 9: To up the colors a little bit, I selected the entire icon, Copy-Merged, and pasted it into a new layer. Then I set this new layer to Soft Light, Opacity 60%.
	Step 10: I Copy-Merged all the layers again, pasted it into a new layer, and smoothed out minor imperfections (such as the harsh angle of her cheek and pixels in the sky) with the blur tool.
	Step 11: Text! Very simple, white text at the top. The X is the font Hans Hand, and "little girl lost" is in Jane Austen, both of which can be found at dafont.com.
	Step 12: You can leave it like above, but I went one step further and created a new layer, filling it with #ffebd5. I set it to Multiply, Opacity 60%. And Voila! We’re done!

WordPress is BY FAR my favorite thing that has come out of the blogging phenomenon. With it being part blog, part content management system, you can do pretty much anything with it.

There are a lot of beautiful themes out there. So what do you do when you like a theme, but want to change the colors? Even worse, what if you don’t know CSS or know how to create a color scheme with hex codes?

Theme Tweaker

If you’re not familiar with CSS, this little plugin might be your best friend. The only complaint I would have is that it doesn’t tell you where the color is coming from, but I suppose that’s something that you might just have to deal with. If, say, you’re looking at your current layout, and want all the areas that are pink to become a certain orange color, that’d be an easy fix.

ColorSchemer

This one is great for every website, not just WordPress. I love this color generator. You can input a hex color code, and it will draw up complimentary colors with their codes for your website. You can darken or lighten the color scheme as well. You can also choose a color from one of the pre-chosen boxes, and find a good color scheme from there.

What are some of your favorite color tricks?