home of the spirit bear

okay this is actually a really simple tutorial even though i thought it would be hard before i tried it!

you are going to need:

• adobe photoshop
• a manga picture that has grey shading (you’ll find out why in a second)
• and a little bit of patience

okay so first you are going to need to find the picture you want to color. as i previously mentioned, it can’t be just black and white. this is because you are going to set your coloring layer as the layer style “color” which has no effect on solid black and solid white. i’m not good at explanations but you’ll figure it out once you start haha

for example, the picture on the left will be bad for this process but the picture on the right will be good (you can color areas like her hair and eyes):

okay so once you have your picture chosen you can start editing. this is the image i chose:

because i guess every time i end up doing this it’s always inori…

anyway, crop the manga page to just the image you want but try not to make it less than 500px wide (unless you’re making a photoset i guess) and also if it is larger than that, DON’T resize it yet, you’re going to want it as big as possible when you start coloring.

notice how there is the frames above her head? you can keep those if you want, but i like to get rid of them. so to do that, use your eye dropper tool to sample the background color (it’s usually just white but not always), and pick a big brush with a hard edge (i used 36px) to start painting it out, but make sure you are doing this on a NEW LAYER. it’s harder to fix mistakes if you are just painting it straight on the background.

so white out the major stuff right now and leave the details for last. mine looked like this:

all that garbage around her head is what we are going to take care of next. so pick a smaller brush (i used 5px and 9px brushes) and carefully go around the picture to get rid of the lines.

once i got all the lines on the white erased, i still had this thing on the gray area:

if you have anything like that, there are two ways to get rid of it. you can sample the gray color and paint it out like you did over the white, but this can look messy depending on the picture. i use the clone stamp tool which i find less obvious.

so click that (it’s on the left below your brushes button and looks like a wooden stamper) and set your brush to around 9px soft edged. duplicate your image just incase, and then alt+click on an area with the solid color you want, and carefully one click at a time start painting out the line. you have to do this on a layer with the actual image and not a new blank layer. if you start seeing the line appearing again as you click (i.e. you are actually painting it in again) then alt+click again to sample it again until you get rid of the whole line. here’s how mine turned out:

if it doesn’t look great and it’s messy then just keep smoothing it out it took me a lot of practice before my stuff even looked passable.

okay so now do your final cropping (i have those funny lines on the sides i got rid of) but don’t resize it yet, and you’re ready to paint!

you might want to merge your layer where you painted out the lines with your image. and once you’ve done that, make a new layer and set the layer mode to  “color”

now either you can pick your own colors, or find an image from an anime or fan art to sample from. i usually sample my colors. i sampled from this picture:

either way, pick an area you want to start with an start filling it in! use a bigger hard edged brush to start and fill in the major areas. don’t worry about going off the edges around white/completely black areas, because the color won’t show up there. another tip is to pick up your brush a lot in case you make a mistake.

here’s how it looks without the details done:

now pick progressively smaller brushes to get into the small spaces for details, and erase anything you see that is out of it’s space.the key here is small strokes and patience! also, as a tip, you can zoom if you are finding it frustrating painting in a really tiny area. or you can do separate layers for separate parts.

here’s mine with all the coloring done and resized+sharpened:

so now you can do all your adjustment layers. i usually use exposure layers for manga and a couple curves layers. occasionally i add simple pattern layers and set them to soft light. here’s my finished product:

and that’s it! if you have questions or requests or anything, you can ask me. and if you want to see more specifically what i did, you can download the psd of this image here.