Choosing a Paint Scheme from TauOnline.Org

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Thanks to sLai for this.

I have noticed quite a few people (Including myself,) trying to figure out a painting scheme for their Tau, loading up painted test models; one day an idea popped up in my head. Why not use Photoshop to alter the colors to try color schemes without having to paint a single model? It worked wonders, it was fast, simple and with great results.

Here's an example

The original picture (From ShasEl_Tael):

Original picture

This is how it looked after editing:

After editing picture

And this is the Fire Warrior I painted as a result of this:

Result model

Now onto the tutorial

I used Photoshop 7 for this, although this tutorial only really uses Hue/Saturation changes which most good graphics design software contains. Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks and Photoshop can all be used with this tutorial. Keyboard shortcuts and diagrams in this tutorial are shown for use with Photoshop 7.

1) Get a picture of a Tau model you want to paint. You can get a picture from Games Workshop's website, a Google search or simply use one of the photos above.
2) Open the Hue/Saturation control (hotkey Ctrl+U) by going to: Image >> Adjustments >> Hue/Saturation. As an example, say that you want to change the color of the armour, which is, for example, light-blue, then change the Master setting to blue on the Edit part at the top left of the Hue/Sat menu:
3) After you selected the color you want to change, you can use the eyedropper tool to get the exact color you want to change.
4) Slide the "Hue" bar to change the color, the "saturation" bar to change the intensity of the color and the "lightness" bar to change the lightness of the image. By using these three bars you can get almost any color you want.
5) If you want a part of the blue armour to change to a different color than the rest of the armour, use the Magic Wand Tool to select the wanted part, and change the color of it individually. Some colors may be hard to duplicate, I, for example, couldn't get a color close to Dark Angels Green, so I selected the green parts of the armour that I wanted to be Dark Angels green, and used the Burn Tool with the settings Shadows, and Exposure at 13%, it worked really good. It made the armour darker and raised the contrast.This is a simple method really, although it is really useful. Give it a try; you may need to mess around with settings depending on what graphics program you are using.