Warhol Effect?

[jjhunter]

Hey all--

I'm playing around with some banner designs for a comm I run, and someone suggested doing a Warhol-esque version of the black and white variant. Does anyone know how to do that? I can easily modify the background, but the greyscale image of the 'poetree' is much more challenging.

Black & white version:






Two different colored backgrounds: (note that the tree remains in greyscale)





How do I selective tint only a portion of a particular layer's tonal range a particular color?



Andy Warhol print for reference.

Comments

[melannen]

There's a bunch of different ways of doing this (more-or-less), and I wouldn't be surprised if there are warhol-izing tutorials out there somewhere that outline a specific method, but the basic way I would do it is:

1. Create a new transparent layer on top of the layer your image is on.
2. Select only the part of the image that you want to tint.
3. On the transparent layer (not the original layer!) fill the selection with the color you want to tint with.
4. Repeat 2-3 until all the areas you want to tint have solid color over them.
5. Play with opacity and mode for the layer with the colors on it until you get an effect you like.
6. You can also put different colors on different layers and use different opacity/mode effects for each layer, if you want something more complicated, or put the image layer over the color layer and play with its mode.
7. When you're done playing, merge the color layers back onto the base layer.

If there's anything in any of those steps you don't know how to do, let me know and I can try to tell you where the tools for doing it are. But the best way for learning about the different layer modes is just to try them all.

[jjhunter]

Oo...that's very clever! Thank you - that should definitely do the trick. (I'm kicking myself because I'm already using some transparency tricks to adjust the lightness of the dreamwidth logo - I should have thought of other ways of playing with it!) Would duplicating the layer with the 'poetree' and then working with the duplicate layer be a good place to start?

[melannen]

I find it's generally not a bad idea to work with a duplicate layer just in case, although since you'll be doing all the work on a new transparent layer anyway, you're not too likely to mess up the original. (You could put the colors directly on a duplicate image layer instead of a plain transparent one and play with layer mode/opacity tricks on that one, if that helps you to get the colors on the right places.)

[sara]

Well, and if you think about it, this makes sense because of how Warhol made those prints -- you're essentially trying to come up with an electronic screenprint.