Photoshop Tips
Using Color Balance and Color Burn in Photoshop to Create an Illustration
By Ben Fishman
Dateline: March 2, 2006
Version: Photoshop CS
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| Ben Fishman intensified his collage depicting
the bombing of Hiroshima using Photoshop’s Color Balance and
Color Burn blending mode.
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The illustration was created
from scanned World War
II-era photos and pieces from
Fishman’s personal collection.
“I was inspired by an
old Japanese book that had
drawings of Japan’s first contact
with Europeans; some of
the imagery was very violent,
and it was the clash of these
two very different cultures
that ultimately led up to the
bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki,” Fishman explains.
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First, Fishman took the scanned image of the
American soldier and changed its Mode to CMYK.
Using Color Balance to shift the lights, midtones,
and shadows, he gave the image more of a sepiatone
look. He then used Curves to increase the
image contrast and to even out the tones. To
create a clean silhouette around the man’s shoulders
and head, Fishman drew a path with the Pen
tool, made it a selection in the Paths palette menu,
and deleted the background to eliminate stains. He
then duplicated the layer and set the blending
mode to Multiply so the whites of the image
would become transparent on top of a cream colored
Background layer.
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Other scanned images were then layered
over the soldier image with various layer
effects applied to achieve transparency and
color intensity. At the top right, Fishman
placed a pair of praying hands and used
Color Balance to bring out bright yellow
and red, then set the blending mode to
Hard Light to increase the image contrast.
As a background along the top of the collage,
he used a Grayscale image of an old city
map converted to CMYK mode and used
Hue/Saturation to add red and pink. First, he
clicked on Colorize, then adjusted Hue to
345, Saturation to 100, and Lightness to -21.
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Over the map, he placed a Grayscale
bomb blast image, converted it to CMYK
mode, and colorized it with Color Balance
adjustments. Directly under the map
layer, he created a fill layer of light yellow,
selected the map layer, and set its blending
mode to Multiply. He merged the two layers
and set the blending mode to Darken
to reveal the map image underneath. He
also placed a scan of a 1,000 Yen note at
the left edge and used a Curves adjustment
to heighten the darks and lights. He
set the layer to Hard Light, which made
the bill slightly transparent and highlighted
its watermarks.
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Using Japanese writing from images
of ancient Japanese scrolls and letters,
Fishman cut and copied them to
separate layers that he felt contrasted
nicely with the soldier. He used the
Hard Light blending mode on some of
the writing images to combine them
with the underlying layers, and the
Color Burn blending mode to get an
aged yellowing effect on the writing.
Just below the Pagoda layer and the
burning village layer at the lower left,
he placed a scan of a piece of red glycerin
soap with interesting color gradations
to get a bright red fire effect.
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The buddha at the bottom was from a
snapshot Fishman took of a statue at Golden
Gate Park in San Francisco. He used Hue/
Saturation for a blue-green color, Curves to
heighten the contrast, and Hard Light as the
blending mode. He placed a tiny skull image
scanned from a plastic skeleton trinket along
the bottom right. He adjusted the image
with Curves, colorized it with Hue/Saturation,
and set the layer blending mode to
Multiply.
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For a last touch, he created a circle
with the Elliptical Marquee tool over the
soldier’s head and filled it with yellow, then
used Color Burn to better blend the soldier
with the background. The final image is shown at left.
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Ben Fishman is an illustrator and designer based in Platz, New York.
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