Colorize Spray Paint
1st edition — by Patrick McNeil — Mar. 23, 2006
Difficulty: Beginner
Application: Photoshop
This tutorial is meant to accompany the Drips
Sprays
& Splatter design
element chapter.
The purpose of this tutorial is to show you a basic technique for applying
color to a black spray paint texture. This is far from advanced but ultra
useful for making these sorts of textures fit into your design. The image
used for this tutorial can be downloaded from the Drips
Sprays &
Splatter article. This article assumes you know how to extract the spray
paint from the white background, this is demonstrated in the Blend
If tutorial.
Step 1
Open the image we are working with to start off.
Follow the steps in the Blend If tutorial
to isolate the spray paint. You might need to merge the splatter with a blank
layer. This is done to essentially apply the Blend If and actually remove
those extra pixels from the layer. If you don't do this you will quickly
discover why this won't work.
We have placed a blue layer below the pattern to show it is isolated properly.
Step 2
Double click the spray layer to get the Layer Style dialog box. Proceed
to the Color Overlay option on the left. Where the pink
is in the image below click and you can select any color you want.
Step 3
This is what your image might look like, depending on your color choices
of course.
Step 4
I changed the light blue background to a darker one to make the pink really
pop. Man, that looks tasty.
Note: One Enormous benefit you might have noticed
at this point is that you might have had some lingering white noise from
the paper below. Since the color overlay completely covers all pixels with
a new color those noise problems disappear. This means you can be a bit more
lenient with your Blend If settings and avoid loosing the
fine details. The texture remains a bit more organic this way.
Step 5
So now you have ultimate power over your spray paint texture! I returned
to the Layer Style pallet and selected a new color. This is what my image
looks like now. You really have the power to make the splatter fit your design
perfectly with out any wacky color correction issues.
Summary
This tutorial is far from advanced but if you didn't know how to do this
I hope this was an eye opener on how easy it really is. Download all the
images from the Drips
Sprays & Splatters page and
have fun.
