Hi, I'm Megumi and in this tutorial I will explain how I understand and use the color correction layers. To do this, I will first go through the functions and possibilities of the different correction levels, and then I'll show you a few applications from my own workflows.

What the correction layers do

You can find the correction levels in the menu bar under the "Level" tab, and if you hover over them with the mouse, CSP will give you a list of the available correction levels.

 

All effects of the correction layers can also be found under the tab Edit - Tonal value correction; the difference is that the tonal value correction is carried out directly on the layer and can no longer be adjusted afterwards.

 

The correction level comes with a settings icon that you double-click to open the settings window. As long as you don't merge this layer with the one below, you can change the settings as you like and at any time of the work, which can be incredibly useful if the color or light conditions change in the course of the work. When painting, remember to turn off the correction layer, because when you pick up the color with the pipette, it takes on the corrected color. If you continue to paint below the correction layer, you'll wonder why the color is changing.

 

Another advantage of correction layers is that they come with a mask. Next to the settings icon you will see a clickable white box. When that is selected, you can edit this mask with an eraser or white paint! So you can not only edit the settings, but also the area to which the corrections will be applied. Cool right?

Correction level: brightness and contrast

Brightness and contrast is the first option. Brightness adjusts the brightness, i.e. the white / black portion of the entire image, within a frame of 100% up and down, while contrast separates the color values from one another, i.e. increases or decreases the color contrast. It is easy to use and understand, but also has few setting options.

Hue, saturation, brightness

The next level of correction is a bit more exciting, and I use this e.g. in character design, a lot for color obsession for clothing.

 

Hue shifts the colors of the image along the color gamut, all by the same amount. Imagine each color in the picture has a place on the color ring and the distances between the colors are fixed. Now you take the whole thing and turn it along the ring - what was previously red moves towards yellow, what was previously blue becomes pink. In my opinion, hue is particularly useful on plain surfaces if you don't want to have a random color effect.

Saturation increases or decreases the color saturation - at -100 the color image becomes a grayscale image, at +100 it looks like an overdriven television. It's a useful tool in post-production if, like me, you tend to use overly saturated colors that I then turn down a bit in the end.

Brightness or "Luminosity" regulates the brightness of the entire picture. Unlike brightness and contrast, you end up with +/- 100 but completely black or white! The difference in brightness and contrast is minimal, but I assume it works with a different algorithm, so the results are different.

Posterization

Have you ever converted a finely crafted image into GIF format? Instead of 2 million colors there are suddenly only 256. Posterization does something similar - it reduces the color gradations of the image. Naturally, the contrast between the gradations increases and results in a picture like "painting by numbers".

Reverse course

Takes the picture and inverts all colors - basically it creates a negative of the picture for those who still know what it is; D While it does not serve a correction purpose like most others, it can be used to achieve interesting effects by using the mask edited and / or changed the correction layer to other modes, such as Devide, Brightness or Hue. A great tool to experiment with after you've finished painting!

Level correction

Level correction basically does similar things to brightness and contrast, but with more control. On the settings panel you can determine which areas should be lighter or darker - with the right handle you expand the highlights, the left handle the shadows, and the middle one shifts the mean values.

Personally, I prefer to work with level correction when it comes to brightness and contrast values, because I find it more intuitive and achieve better results faster than with brightness / contrast. The results are not that different, depending on how you can deal with them. A big difference, however, is that you can also apply the level correction to the individual color channels - that means you can determine how much red / green / blue should be at which point.

I then imagine that what was previously "white" is now red (if I have selected the red color channel ". The more I drag into the" light "area, the more red the picture gets.

The other way around, the red disappears when I pull up the shadows - so that only green and blue remain.

The tone curve

Basically, the tone curves do the same thing as the tone correction, only with more control. The point at the bottom left are the darkest colors (shadows) in the image - if you drag that to the top left corner, the shadows in the image will become lighter until they turn white. The point at the top right are the highlights - if you pull the point down, everything will be darker to completely black. Where you only had one mean value with the tone value correction that you could shift, you can touch the mean values at several points in the tone curve. But more control also means more required understanding, which is why I don't use it so often - it doesn't come to me particularly intuitively.

As with the tone value correction, you can also apply the tone curves to the individual color channels. You can do this in the upper left corner of the settings window.

Color Balance

Another color correction option - Color Balance offers a little less control again, but could be more intuitive for many. The color sliders tilt the color balance in the direction of two opposite colors, which in my opinion is a good tool if you want to generate a general color / light mood.

 

In addition to the 3 color controls, you can determine which brightness areas you want to influence (shadows, mean values, highlights).

Binarization

Binarization makes the picture monochrome, i.e. pure white and pure black. You can also achieve the effect via layer effects by changing the display color from color to monochrome, but binarization has the advantage that you can determine which brightness levels should be in the black or white area.

Gradient Map

Gradient Map is a super exciting tool - you have to imagine that CSP takes the brightness values of the image, packs them into a color gradient and then replaces this gradient with colors.

The exciting thing is that it doesn't have to be a two-tone gradient, nor from light to dark or vice versa. Finding the right combinations is a bit tricky, but there are gradient sets provided by Clip Studio Paint as well as user-made ones that give a lot of material to experiment with.

Application ideas

After all the theory, I'll show you some of my own areas of application in which I use correction levels. Not all of them are mentioned in the video, and as I come up with new ideas I plan to add these techniques to this tutorial. A lot came to my mind while experimenting, some I've already used in workflows - in general I can only recommend that you give yourself time and space for experiments.

Clean up scanned drawings

If you like to make your preliminary drawings on paper and scan or photograph them, you will have noticed more often that the paper is not completely white, that erased streaks are more visible than desired, or that the paper structure disturbs the sketch. Instead of manually removing the streaks, as you would do with analog, you can add a brightness / contrast layer and increase the contrast. Grayscale become lighter, shadows are retained or darker, so that you have a good chance of getting a clean drawing for editing.

Manga backgrounds from photos

Clip Studio Paint has a super cool Layer Properties feature. You can find the window for this via Menu> Window> Layer Property, and it has 4 effects plus Expression Color. One of the 4 effects is "Extract Line", or "Find edges", which finds the boundaries between colored areas and turns them into a contour. The other thing we're using here is "Tone"; that transforms all surfaces into grid foil!

 

So the first thing I do is take a photo and duplicate the layer. I hide the lower of the two and set the "Extract Line" effect for the upper one.

That looks quite nice, but it's still too dirty for me. To get rid of the little gray scraps, I add a Level Correction layer and increase the brightness value. Then I make a few minor adjustments like the width of the lines, then I set the layer to "multiply".

 

I set the lower level to grayscale and notice that it is too dark for me. So I put a tonal value correction over it to lighten the whole thing up a bit and make it more contrasting so that the surfaces stand out from each other better. In order for this to be really noticeable, I have to merge the tonal value correction with the photo layer, and only then apply the raster foil effect.

 

The result may not be perfect, but the basis is great! Depending on the photo template, this works better or less well, but it is very simple.

Correction levels on the motif "moon bunny"

Next, I'll show you which of the correction layers I used for the motif that I used for the demonstration. It starts with the skin - I shaded it in a light gray and then put a gradient map over it in overlay mode.

The dress is made up of the elements

• Base (flat blue color, mode: normal)

• Stars (Galaxy pattern on the fabric, mode: Glow Dodge)

• Ornament (Golden Pattern, Flat Yellow Color, Mode: Normal)

• Shadows (purple-gray on white, mode: multiply) and

• Highlights (yellow on black, mode: Glow dodge).

 

To see which color I like for the dress, I added a color correction layer - if I change the settings there, I can see how the dress would look in other colors.

Now I've added another color correction layer over the Galaxy pattern - but if I adjust it, it affects the color of the fabric. To avoid this, I click the "Create clipping mask" field for the layers (Clip to Layer below). This means that the correction only relates to the star pattern level, so that I can change the color of the pattern individually.

After the picture was actually finished, I noticed that the hair looked like it was shining. It would be cool if they would throw light on the dress instead of me shading it down to the sides. For this I use the correction layer "Reverse Gradient" and set the layer in the Glow dodge mode for a nice glow effect.

I shaded the hair through gray and put a gradient over it in overlay mode. Not entirely sure of what the background was going to be, I wasn't locked into the colors - to vary it up a bit, I put tone curve layers on top to see what I liked best.

Something I do a lot is adding a glow through the Add Glow mode. I find these particularly beautiful when they are not white but have a color - in this case I made the glow golden, but then the hair turned blue - so blue light would be more appropriate. So I put a color correction layer on top and adjust the light color, which totally changes the atmosphere of the whole picture!

Find color palettes

Something I do a lot with portraits is to construct skin shading depending on the ambient light. To do this, I first determine a background color and a basic color for the skin.

 

The rule of thumb is that in cold light the shadows should be warm and in warm light the shadows should be cool. So I choose a beige tone for the shadows and put them on one layer in multiply mode, and a bluish tone for the lights on one layer in Glow Dodge mode. To see which tone it should be exactly, I put a color correction layer (Hue / Saturation / Luminosity) over it and set it as a clipping mask (clip to layer below) for the light and shadow layer. Now I can happily try out what seems to me the most harmonious, then I combine the layers and use the resulting colors as a palette.

Summer - winter - variations

The picture is ready, but somehow the mood could be a little more clear? The lighting mood can be changed super easily with Color Balance. For more summer you increase the red and yellow values, for winter blue and magenta.