Adding Colour Depth to images for use in sprays
Looking at some sprays in game that are reproductions of photos are often hard on the eyes. Alot of photos that are acquired by people are prepped for the Internet. They are stripped of alot of their original colour depth or "thinned out" so that they load faster on web pages. This is all fine and good and generally considered good practise for those of us who are not on broad band. But the "thinned out" image does not translate well into a spray. As well, I will state that while I find the simplicity of the Half Life Logo Creator (available at www.tfcgaschamber.com in the download section) a pleasure to work with for text sprays, I have never figured out what the filters really do and have had no luck to date creating sprays using photos. For this task I use "WALLY" (also available in the download section of www.tfcgaschamber.com) and while I am not going to give you a tutorial on WALLY, I am going to show you how to punch the colour depth of a picture up to help you get better sprays with photos using Photoshop 7.
First we find an image we would like to use. Isn't she lovely?
Now, load it into Photoshop and save it back so you always have a backup and save as a large file so as to insure no further loss of colour information, note the original size of the file circled in yellow.
Now right click on the background layer tab as shown below and select the "duplicate layer" option.
Next, click the Layer tab, select Layer Styles and choose "Color Overlay"
Now select the mode to "Overlay" as shown below, don' tpanic when the image turns red, it is merely the default colour, we will change it on our next move.
Change the colour of the overlay using the colour picker to black to darken an image (which we will do here) or white to lighten and image or feel free to pick your own colour.
Now bring the opacity of the image down to a desired level, I used 40% as shown above and the result is pretty dramatic but it defines the task. You can go lower so that more of the actual image shows through if you like, its a matter of preferance really. Now we want to save the image back to see the difference. As you will note below the physical size of the file has grown, we have magnified the colour depth, and this image will show better as a spray as a result.
Note the final size of the image circled in yellow compared to the original image that we started with. We have gone from 124.36 K to 153.42 K in file size. Want to deepen the colour even more? Repeat these steps. To size the image or to check acceptable sizes go back to the main tutorial page. It is always important to remember to back up all original images. Photoshop can produce some great things but it can also ruin a perfectly good image if you are not careful, once it is saved... it's over.
If you have any personal tips or tricks you would like to add please E-Mail them to gronk161@tfcgaschamber.com we are only interested in your own tips and tricks. Help us help others. Hope you have found this useful. Oh and if you were wondering how she looks in game...
The Gas Chamber Crew