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[S-22]

Spice up those drab Milkshape/HLMV screen caps by adjusting levels. Also demonstrates selecting by color range.

Introduction

If you've been making some spiffy CS-Art by taking screenshots of models in MilkShape or Half-Life Model Viewer (HLMV), you may have noticed that the images are awfully dark. Adjusting the brightness or contrast tends to kill the image quality. You probably have also wanted to get rid of that dull background color and replace it with a scene or something. This quick tutorial will show you how to work around these problems by using level adjustments and selecting by color range in Photoshop.

Before continuing, you should know some Photoshop basics. Phong, Designs by Mark, and Alpha Project (thanks for the link, Strife_11) all have some good beginner tutorials (and then some).

Initial Screenshot and Color Range

So let's get down to business. Open up your model in MilkShape or HLMV and pose him the way you want. Our short term goal is to discard the background and just have the model after we copy the image to Photoshop. In order to do that, we have to make the background a solid, distinct color. Follow these instructions depending on which program you're using:

HLMV: By default there's a black background. Let's change it to green. Click Options, Background Color, select the brightest green, and click OK.

MilkShape: By default there's a blue background that will work just fine. Right click the 3D window and click Maximize. Right Click again and turn off the grid and axis markers.

Do a print screen and fire up Photoshop. Paste to a new image and select/copy the portion that you want. Paste to a new image again and delete the "Background" layer as it will only confuse us later on.

Click Select, Color Range. Make sure Fuzziness is set to "0" and the "Image" bullet is selected (you can also fiddle around with the "Selection Preview" options but it's not neccessary). Move the cursor over the green and click. Then click OK. Notice the dotted selection that appears. Press delete and voila! No more green (thank god). It's time to fix up the brightness.

Adjusting the Levels and Further Tweaking

Click Select, Deselect to clear the selection. Click Image, Adjust, Levels. You'll see a Levels dialog box pop up. Now play around with the triangles for the histogram thingy until the image looks right. Here's a before and after comparison (click to enlarge):

An improvement, yes? Sometimes parts of the body may be slightly bleached (like the left hand in the upper right image). For the perfectionists out there, you can avoid bleaching by following these steps prior to level adjusting: Select the portion of body that you want to protect. Feather the selection a bit (click Select, Feather) and then copy it to a new layer. Do the usual level adjustments to the original layer with the model. Go back to the new layer we created and play with the layer options. For example, I used Hard Light at about 80% opacity to fix the hand for the tutorial image:

That's it. The funny thing is, if you use QSB or 3D Studio MAX, you don't really have to go through all this because you can do light sourcing. Maybe a tutorial for that process would be beneficial, eh?

- Daemonite

btw, those are not Beta 7 berettas. They are actually scaled down versions of this fine piece of work by Disinfect.

[hitler]

中文翻译啊