Sketch-Tinting Tricks with Photoshop

When I have a bit of time, I sometimes play with my pencil sketches in Photoshop. I have recently been tinting my sketches from the Manchester train:

In the past, people have asked how this is done. It's easy if you are at least a little familiar with Photoshop. Why not find yourself a drawing and have a go...

1: Make sure your sketch is RGB, not greyscale, then create a new layer above the drawing.

2: Choose 2 quite different colours. For the sketch above, I chose these:

3: Use Gradient Fill to create a colour blend on the new layer:

4: In your Layers Palette, change the light filter setting for the new layer (where it says Normal): set it instead to Color.

And there you go: Bob's your uncle! (whoever Bob is...).

For a more subtle tinting, that also won't pick up so much of the paper's 'background noise', try setting the light filter to Soft Light instead:

It's fun to try out the various filters when you're playing, as unexpected things can happen. Here are a couple of other immediate effects created by simply setting the filter to Screen and Linear Light:

Also, when I use wording on my sketches, I quite like to colour it in. For this I create another new layer to draw my colour on, and set the light filter to Multiply. I generally try out tints of the colours already used.

I think I like the third one best, created simply by changing the layer order, so that the new coloured wording was dragged between the other two. So here's my final piece: