Locked lesson.
About this lesson
This technique is good for adjusting images at the pixel level.
Exercise files
There are no related exercise files for this lesson, or we cannot provide them due to copyright issues.
Quick reference
Topic: Minecraft Skin
Personalize your Minecraft Character Skin.
When to use
This technique is good for adjusting images at the pixel level.
Instructions
Download the Character Skin and convert for editing
- Log into your Minecraft account, go to the profile section.
- Download the skin and drag into Photoshop.
- Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) + ‘0’ to fit the skin to the canvas.
- Go to Menu/Image/Mode/RGB color.
Edit the skin
- Add an adjustment layer: Hue and satuation.
- Above the hue slider switch from master to a specific color (this adjustment will only affect that color).
- Choose cyan to change the hue of the shirt pixles.
- Choose blue to change the pants.
Paint the skin for touch ups
- Create a new layer.
- Choose the pencil tool for better accuracy.
- Paint in the colors that you want.
Brighten up sections
- Create a new layer.
- Set the blend mode to soft light.
- Paint over with a light peach color to keen original color tone.
Save
- Save for web as a PNG file.
- Upload back to Mincraft Profile.
- 00:04 First off, before you even touch Photoshop you need the character skin.
- 00:08 If you log into your Minecraft account and hop into your Profile section, you'll be
- 00:12 able to download the skin right from there and then drag it into Photoshop.
- 00:17 When this skin in particular is opened,
- 00:19 you're gonna notice that it's tiny, very tiny.
- 00:23 The exact dimensions are 64 by 32 pixels, which will make it very difficult to see,
- 00:28 but because we're working with a pixel based skin, you can zoom right on in and
- 00:33 fit the skin to your screen, with the Cmd or Ctrl+0 shortcut.
- 00:37 If you were to simply enlarge the document rather than zooming,
- 00:40 you'd loose the sharp pixelation and end up with a blurry skin.
- 00:43 Plus, as the final result needs to be 64 by 32 when you re-upload it,
- 00:47 keeping the original dimensions will make your life much easier.
- 00:51 So now that you're zoomed in, we can see the skin quite well.
- 00:54 Let's start off with the basics.
- 00:56 The Minecraft skin is separated into a few sections.
- 00:59 The head is at the top, the legs are on the bottom, the chest is to the right, and
- 01:04 the arms are at the far right.
- 01:06 And each section contains the different sides of your character.
- 01:09 The front, the top, the back, and the sides.
- 01:13 To start editing, I wanna simply change the color of the shirt and
- 01:16 the pants, which will be done using an adjustment layer.
- 01:19 But you may notice that many of our options are currently greyed out.
- 01:23 Many times when you bring in a PNG or a GIF from online, the image will be set to
- 01:28 indexed color mode, which will disable you from using many of Photoshop's tools.
- 01:32 To fix this, head up to the image menu, down to mode, and
- 01:36 then set the image to RGB color.
- 01:39 Perfect, now we can add an adjustment layer.
- 01:41 There's a few adjustments that'll help us shift the colors,
- 01:43 including selective color and curves.
- 01:45 But to keep things simple, the hue and saturation adjustment will do the trick.
- 01:50 Once the adjustment has been added,
- 01:51 your first instinct may be to shift the colors by sliding the hue.
- 01:54 Hue around, but you may notice this is shifting the colors on a global scale.
- 01:59 It isn't very specific.
- 02:01 So, right above the hue slider, you can switch from master to a more
- 02:04 specific range of colors like reds, greens, blues and so on.
- 02:09 Starting off with the shirt, the default color should fit in the cyan range, and
- 02:13 once that's set.
- 02:15 Shift in the hue will only affect the cyans in your image which in
- 02:18 this case is the shirt.
- 02:20 I'll change the shirt's color to red and then bring down the saturation a touch,
- 02:24 just so it's not so vibrant.
- 02:26 Good. Next are the pants.
- 02:28 They seem to have a touch of purple in them, but
- 02:30 they should fall into the blue range.
- 02:32 If you have a need to expand your range,
- 02:35 you can use the little sliders at the bottom.
- 02:37 So if I want to increase the blues to also include a little bit of purple,
- 02:41 I can grab the right hand slider, and shift it over a touch.
- 02:45 Now for the color of the pants,
- 02:46 I'm going to shift the hue until I get a nice vibrant green right about there.
- 02:51 So now our character has a nice vibrant red and green outfit.
- 02:55 But you might have noticed that the eyes have also changed color which we
- 02:58 probably don't want.
- 02:59 So to take care of this, you could either use the adjustment layers layer mask or
- 03:03 you can paint in a new color.
- 03:05 Let's do some painting.
- 03:07 Create a new layer and
- 03:08 then instead of grabbing your Brush tool which you would normally use for painting,
- 03:12 hold down on the Brush tool in the Tools bar and choose the Pencil tool instead.
- 03:17 The pencil will make painting pixels much easier because as you can see,
- 03:21 the brush is nice and square like a pixel.
- 03:24 This is where you can go really crazy with the customization of
- 03:27 your skin by changing the color of your eyes and
- 03:30 you can even paint in cool designs on your shirt, pants, or even tattoos on your arm.
- 03:35 Now one last tip before we finish.
- 03:37 Another technique to change color is to paint on a layer that
- 03:40 has the blend mode set to soft light, or color.
- 03:44 For instance, if I want to lighten up the skin tone a bit, I can create a new layer
- 03:47 ,set the blend mode of that layer to soft light, and then with a light peach color,
- 03:53 I can paint over top of the current skin which'll change the color and
- 03:57 keep the shading that comes with the original skin.
- 04:00 And of course using the techniques that you just learned, if you want to
- 04:03 shade the skin even more or remove some of the shading, you can very easily do so.
- 04:07 So I am gonna finish the edit right here, but now that you know the process,
- 04:11 you can use these techniques to really customize the skin to your liking.
- 04:14 And once it's complete, save it out as a PNG and upload it back to
- 04:18 your Minecraft profile, which is the same page that you downloaded the skin from.
- 04:22 And the next time that you log into Minecraft,
- 04:24 you're gonna see your new skin in action and that'll do it.
- 04:27 Using adjustment layers, the Pencil tool and
- 04:30 some blending changes, you can customize your skins as much as you like.
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