Sometimes colorizing a piece of clip art is better than using one that is already in color. You can add just the right colors in the right places to suit your purposes.
More Desktop Publishing Quick Tips
- Create a duotone. This is an option with grayscale bitmap images (you can convert B&W or vector images in order to apply a duotone effect). This creates an image colored with shades of two colors (usually black and one other color).
- Add a sepia tone. This reddish brown tint is often applied to photos to make them look old. The same process can be applied to most any piece of clip art.that's been converted to grayscale. Change the color from reddish brown to other colors for different monochromatic effects such as blue for a blueprint effect.
- Fill all the black areas (often the outlines) with a new color.
- Fill all the white areas with a new color.
- With bitmap images, zoom in close in an image editor and change the color of individual pixels or use selection tools to isolate groups of pixels or areas of the image. Use the paintbrush or fill tools in the software to change the color one area at a time. When coloring contiguous areas in different colors, it can take careful manipulation of the selection or masking tools.
Colorizing Tutorials for Image Editing Software
- With vector images, the usual method is to ungroup the objects that make up an image, select them individually and change their color. Depending on your illustration software, you may be able to make global changes (for example, change all black objects to red). For simple images, recoloring a vector image is often easier than colorizing a bitmap image. For complex images, it can become a tedious process. In some cases it might be worthwhile to convert the image to a bitmap format and do the coloring in an image editor.
To change the color of a piece of clip art that is already in color, you might want to try first converting it to grayscale or B&W then use the colorizing techniques described above.
