Photoshop layer affects - Color, Overlay, or Multiply?

chrisaakins

@Zachary-Drenski Sure! I am a traditonal artist and art teacher who is trying to transition into illustration and digital art. I know traditional mediums pretty well but Photoshop and all its abilities is making me feel like a kid again.

Nyrryl Cadiz

@Laurel-Aylesworth i usually just use normal layer for coloring. I use multiply for shadows and Color dodge for lights.

xin li

I was looking for the ultimate answer for this question earlier this year. My conclusion is "it depends...", which is both exciting and frustrating. The frustrating part is every image requires trial and error to get something I like, the process looked very mess to me, and it does not get smoother, but I got used to it. The exciting part is making image is not a streamline process, that also means unexpected positive surprises along the way.

Two things I learned from my experiments:

Images with light tones and dark tones work very differently. In general, multiply layers works better with light images, and color overlay works better on dark images. (as many of you mentioned, I also mixed up different layer properties in one image all the time.)
Approach an image as if you were paint it traditionally first. Understand how artists work with different traditional media has given me a lot of interesting ideas about the process of making digital illustrations.

Laurel Aylesworth

@xin-li Thank you for your thoughts. I also find that with every piece, there's trial and error...I thought I'd have a fool proof process by now, but it sounds like this is normal. I find that the closer I am to the finished piece, sometimes the harder it gets. I am LOVING your ink pieces on Instagram, by the way. There's so much life in them.

Laurel Aylesworth

@Nyrryl-Cadiz Oh, I never played with color dodge. I'll give that a try.
@TessaW I definitely agree with checking out favorite artists...always good to go back to that. Yep, shadows are definitely going on the muddy side if I use a cool desaturated purple, so the warm tones are feeling better to me. I'll post my piece soon -- hopefully I'll get out of the ugly phase of it soon. There's always an ugly phase - lol
@Zachary-Drenski It's oddly comforting to know even pros like you have challenges with digital color. It's a surprise every time!

DOTTYP

I use a normal layer at low opacity for colouring and Multiply layer for the shadows at about 50% opacity, sometimes a colour dodge layer looks good for lights and some people use hard light to add light .I could not understand all this for years but now I realize just fiddle with the sliders until you are happy with the result.

jdubz

Personally I've been struggling with coloring because there seems to be SO many different techniques to do it. And it compounded the problem because every artist I really like seems to do it completely differently.

Some artists say you should paint in value only (black and white) then add color. Marco Bucci I think is one of the more outspoken voices against that because to his point colors that begin to work off of each other create their own magic that coloring value simply will never get. And I've tried both and I honestly can't say which technique I actually even like best.

If for example you're doing the value based approach, it's usually the best route to do a gradient map to give everything a baseline, then you're using Overlay, Multiply and Normal layers together in different opacities to finish the job. If you're doing the what I might call the "painterly" approach, then a lot of these artists are painting the entire piece on usually just one layer, mistakes be damned and they consider mistakes to play in the finished piece.

One technique that I've used and really liked is once your overall piece is done and you're adding shadows, do a complete multiple layer over the entire canvas in one color and set it to like 40% opacity. Add a layer mask and then just start painting in shadows in huge sweeps. It starts to look "right" REALLY fast and you can change your shadow color from cool to warm to see how it affects the final result.

Zachary Drenski

@Laurel-Aylesworth lol, I'm no pro @chrisaakins I have been working digitally for years and moving in a couple of months. After we get settled into a new place I can't wait to try my hand at traditional painting again! Now I know who to go to for advice.

Phil Cullen

This is a mad topic because there are so many options/techniques. A lot of the responses covered most areas.

Common techniques I would use are adjustment layers check colorise, move the hue slider down to a bluish hue if for instance it's outdoors and you want bluish shadows move the value slider down to darken it and drop the saturation slightly and your whole piece will have a dark bluish hue to it, then I invert the mask and it disappears then I paint in my shadows in the adjustment layer mask and I usually drop the opacity on that layer, no blend mode though. I could do about 3 of these at varying levels of opacity to build up shadows.

For lights (let's say sun) I add adjustment layer check colorise, move the hue slider to yellowish hue and pull the value way up toward white and boost the saturation so your piece looks blown out, drop the opacity to around 70 turn blend mode to overlay of soft light invert the mask on the adjustment layer and paint into the mask.

This technique means youd just painting in masks using black and white. I like this way even just to get going.

Hope that helps a bit

jdubz

@Phil-Cullen One thing I've noticed though is that "Colorize" style seems to work differently based on the program. Sketchbook, Photoshop and Procreate I know for certain differ wildly on how colorize interacts with the colors. Oddly, it works really well for Sketchbook in my opinion, but the other two just make the colors not reliable (at least on the two platforms I'm running on).