Five top Photoshop tips for great spot colour

Unleash your creativity and create a masterpiece with a spot colour flourish!

1. Cut corners

To give you a helping hand with spot colour, you can use a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to lower the saturation of different colours. We used it here to lower the saturation of the Greens, Cyans, Blues and Magentas, so that we were left with only the strong reds.

2. Use Layer Masks

Use a Black and White Adjustment Layer to convert the image to mono, then paint on a Layer Mask to selectively control which areas of the image you want in colour, and which in black and white.

3. Add punch

An S-shaped curve (with one point pulled down in the shadows and a second pulled up in the highlights) will help to make the colours really pop, as well as giving the mono areas more punch.

4. Combine technique

After completing the Spot Colour effect on the boat, we used the Smudge tool to turn the image into an expressive digital painting.

5. Use filters

When creating digital painting effects, you can give your image a greater sense of realism by adding a little noise with the Noise filter. This helps to grunge up the image so that it doesn’t look too perfect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.