|  Now
comes the fun part. The image above looks good, but it doesnt really run the full
gamut of colors that real skin does.
The
shadows are what gives it away. They are just darker versions of the same skin
color. This
is why using overlays usually doesnt work, and why most texture artists resort
to painting everything by hand, because they can paint the color into the shadows.
Take your grey scale layers, first your shadow map, then your fine details
map (both are still greyscale), and colorize them. Either go to Image>adjustments>hue/saturation,
or press ctrl+u. There is a box at the bottom that says colorize. Click this,
and the greyscale image will now be a monotone color. Play with the sliders till
it looks good with the skin. For mine, it was a deep blue for the light map, and
a deep pink for the details layer. You will barely have to shift them, and the
color will be barely noticable, but when the skin layer interacts with it, you
will get great shadow color in your map. You will have to experiment for a while,
it took me a few tries, and Aaryn kept coming out looking like he had used sunless
tanning oil, but when your done it should look something like this (above). Notice
how the image on the right does not seem like skin. It is lacking something. The
image on the left, has those nice pink edges and blue shadows. I really turned
it up so you could see the difference, but even when it is slight, it will do
leaps and bounds for the believability of your skin.
|
Ok,
so now you have great, believable skin tones, but wait, something still seems
off. Its because the human body doesnt keep the same saturation all over. Joints,
and other parts do not receive as much sun as the majority of your skin, so they
are more pale. In order to accomplish this, and keeping with my method of being
able to change everything, you dont just want to desaturate your colors, you want
to control it, and be able to put it back if need be. So create a new layer, and
set the layer blending mode to Saturation. Now wherever you paint with a white
brush, it will desaturate the layers below. I painted the elbows, the armpits,
the fronts and backs of the knees. The image to the right shows where I painted,
the layer is set to normal so you can see the brush marks.
This
will result in nice areas of desaturated skin. 
