I would answer in "Teach a Man to Fish" but my technique for this one isn't very tutorial-friendly. Lots of trial and error.

The biggest problem is the gradient of the character shading. If this were solid, discrete colors (or even hatched shading), it would have been much easier.

I'm sure Photoshop has brushes that could tackle this issue easily. I do not use PS and don't have brush capabilities.

To make this a little easier, I got rid of the colors. I turned the image grayscale. Then played with the brightness and contrast as well as the levels to bring make the gray areas, a little lighter without disturbing the black outline.

Then we must get Venom's original sign off his chest. Again, if this were solid colors, we could just use the eye-dropper tool to grab the sourrounding color and use the line tool or paintbrush to paint over. However, since there is a gradient, it would be obvious where we did this.

So we much use copy and paste with the lasso selection tool. Grab little bits of area around the logo and copy and paste in a new layer over the logo. You really want this to look seamless or close. To really fix the seams, I used a gaussian blur on all the copied areas. When you use a gaussian blur though, sometimes it the edges become transparent. You might have to do this several times to cover an area or copy that layer to make the edges less transparent.

I used a pretty standard masking technique to render the Saints logo and put in a layer over Venom's chest. I added a few white paint lines in a new layer over the Saints logo. Then I gaussian blurred them to create that highlight effect. Then I copied his hands and put them in a layer over the logo.

To finish the image I put a solid gold layer on top of the entire image. I changed that layer properties to "overlay" and took the transparency down a touch.

That might be a bit confusing. If something is particulary unclear, let me know and I will do my best to describe it differently.

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Posted by Hopeful Doc

Member since Sep 2010

15388 posts

Posted on 4/6/11 at 10:47 am to timdallinger

I understood most of that. When it comes to replacing gradients/shaded areas, I'm usually at a loss for what to do and just give up. I might play around with this one a bit more thanks to your explanation.

So in an area where the symbol was (basically his two pecs) that isn't covered by the new symbol (and I'm trying to think of how to apply this to future Farks, too), how do you go about filling it?
If I had to guess, you did this after it was in grayscale so it was easier to fill with a near-uniform color (picked from the nearby area), and when you re-colorized it, there's not a noticeable edge anywhere.

...am I even close?

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Posted by LSU Tigerhead

Metairie

Member since Nov 2007

5165 posts

Posted on 4/6/11 at 11:54 am to Hopeful Doc

quote:
I understood most of that. When it comes to replacing gradients/shaded areas, I'm usually at a loss for what to do and just give up.

I'm in the same boat. I'm using an old version of photoshop, v7.0, from 2002. It's nice but took a while to learn to do even the basics.

Fortunately I have gotten better using the clone feature but I still don't know how to completely change the color. Case in point: in a thread last week someone wanted a dress changed from black to powder blue for a Dodgers color. I copied the dress to an empty background and managed to get the dress a deep blue but when I put it back in the photo, it seemed to go back to its original black color. It drove me crazy. Eventually I gave up.

Maybe a point-by-point tutorial is the only way I'll get it to work right.

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Posted by timdallinger

Member since Nov 2009

1594 posts

Posted on 4/6/11 at 11:59 am to Hopeful Doc

No, even in grayscale there is a gradient. I could have taken all the shades out using levels and been left with a black and white image. That would have been easy to edit. But then how do you get the gradient color back? That is a technique called digital painting and I cannot do it- both a lack of software and that requires some incredible skill.

So I had to make area over Venom's chest uniform with gradients. This is the difficult part to explain. Let me try again.

On Venom's chest, the logo needs to be removed. If I were to just paint it with a solid color, you would be able to tell because there is a gradient, a blending of colors over that area.

So I selected a small area near that logo on the chest to try and keep the colors close. Using the lasso selection, I copied that area and pasted it in a new layer over the chest logo. I did the quite a few times with different areas. Now, there will still be seams where you pasted pixels. To get rid of these, you apply a gaussian blur the the entire layer. The blur will blend the colors together. You have to play with the amount of blur to get it right. Too much, it either looks like smudge; too little the individual pixel edges are still evident. Also, you have to make sure that when you gaussian blur the area, the edges don't become transparent. If that is the case, I copy the layer a variable number of times and merge them down upon each other to make it less transparent.

Rereading this, it still probably isn't clear. I'll try again if you get lost in the explanation.

Also, if you have PS, use brushes. I think GIMP might have that capability too. PAINT.net does not.

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Posted by Hopeful Doc

Member since Sep 2010

15388 posts

Posted on 4/6/11 at 12:46 pm to timdallinger