Minecraft Skin

Quick reference

• 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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