More Awesome Than You!

Yeah, hey, I'm Deinarious. I have been looking practically everywhere for values that could be put into the GIMP in converting, say, a pale skintone into a tan one, then tan into medium, then medium into dark. I checked a link at MTS2, where I've been a member since 2005 as jikken21, and found a blank space on a webpage. And it was from a site formated for my browser, FireFox. Anyhow, any help would be appreciated.

By the way, kudos to El Presidente for his awesome coding. I originally downloaded some of it from MTS2 when I first started playing TS2, which was before MTS2 required accounts for downloading... or was it when University came out? I don't know.Anyhow, like I said, I would appreciate any help, and also do hope to become a productive (and somewhat amusing) part of this community. And so concludes my first post.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/pancake_bunny.jpg)

So... you basically want to change the tint of a skintone to make it darker?

There is no such thing, you must calculate that according what you are previewing. If you darker, let´s say, 30% and then 30% more you can end with a lobster-skintone, cause when the luminosity changes also changes the saturation. You need to manually make one by one, compensating the saturation when you change the lightning. It´s RGB, after all.

You just need photoshop and the skills of an artist.  There's no magic tirck.

Fixed.

You can, however, copy over the adjustment layers for each of the texture files for that skintone, so that they are all changed in the exact same way, and you only have to fiddle around with it once.

True, but this doesn´t mean that you will have a good result for all skintones because they don´t have the same color levels, that´s why I mentioned the "lobster effect". If you build a curve and apply the same curve to all 4 different skintones is most probable that doesn´t work for all of them, specially considering the drastic difference between the light one and the medium ones. Lobster effect is the most probable result (because when you make an image darker the reds automatically become more saturated) - or a skintone that has no lightning and become greyish.

Indeed, there are no standard values that will work for all skins.  Not all pale skintones are exactly the same shade, so you cannot apply the same filters/transformations to all pale skintones and expect the end results to match.  You generally have to do this by hand - putting your document-in-progress side by side with a document that looks like the shade you want to achieve can help.

You mentioned GIMP which I haven't used in a long time, but in Photoshop you have the option of using Actions.  I rather like using actions for recolouring skins as there's a pile of images to recolour, and it's generally easier to let it do it in batches... this is especially helpful if you have multiple filters/effects/etc. that you put each tone through before it's how you like it, i.e. from pale to tan you change the saturation, then the contrast, then the brightness in three different filters.  Just remember to deselect eyes and teeth on the faces before doing this or you'll end up with weirdness in those areas.  Perhaps GIMP has some sort of automated batch type function as well.

Also, something to bear in mind is that not all skintones -can- be recoloured well to other tones.  Pale skintones only have a limited range of colours included in the textures, so if you try to transform a pale skintone to dark, no matter what you do, you're probably going to end up with mud, not a dark skintone.  The information just isn't there to give you a sufficient range of highlights and shadows doing an extreme transformation like that - just as you can't go from a dark skintone to a light one with no problems either.  It can be done in certain circumstances, depending on your skill in your graphics program and what skin you're recolouring, but most of the time, if you want to take a skin and make a full range of it, you need to use a medium skintone, which will generally go dark and light a heck of a lot easier than starting at either end of the spectrum.