Gold style: Photoshop tutorial example – chrome metal coloring

Once the image contrast is adjusted, it’s time to improve the colors of the final metallic effect.

Hue / Saturation is probably the simplest and easiest way to color an image in Photoshop.

Let’s see how Hue and Saturation work in Photoshop trough an example in this tutorial. We are going to turn your metallic style into a gold chrome effect.

As we did with contrast adjustments in the previous step of this tutorial, we should create an independent new adjustment layer with the Hue / Saturation corrections. So we can keep the original chrome intact, re-adjust the hue & saturation parameters later and control the intensity of the color correction through the adjustment layer opacity.

Open the Hue/Saturation window by double clicking the new adjustment layer icon. It’s important to activate the Colorize checkbox. That way, the selected color will be applied to all the image elements, replacing any previously existing color.

Drag the hue slider to select the target color of the chrome effect. We will be using a desaturated mid yellow hue to create this gold chrome Photoshop effect as an example.

It is useful to check the color bar at the bottom while selecting the hue to colorize the metal. Such color bar is a good reference to see which color is being actually applied to the whole image.

It’s often a good idea to start with high saturation values and decrease them after picking the desired hue. So you can quickly identify the color that you are using as your new metal color. Finally, lower the saturation value to achieve a more subtle and realistic colored metal effect.

The main advantage of Color Balance is that you can separately tweak shadows, highlights and midtones, giving you a lot of control over the final coloring result rendered for your metals.

An additional advantage of the precise coloring achieved with Photoshop color balance is that it won’t override any previously existing color. So if you tweak carefully your image colors using this precise option, it may preserve some previously existing colors.

If you are trying to simulate a light source, try to match the color of such light source in the highlight section.

The true color of the metal itself should be applied to the shadows of your metallic texture.

Finally, the midtones should be adjusted to a mixed color of the light source and the true metal color.

Take into account that chrome, silver and most metals have a black diffuse color, and so their main color is taken from the environment (the reflections plus the light source color).

On the other hand, the gold style metal of this example has a dark, low saturated yellow color. So we are going to tweak specifically the shadows and midtones increasing the amount of golden tones.

To adjust the final color using color balance, just drag the RGB sliders till the resulting color is your desired hue.

Sometimes it’s useful to think about the inverse process: which color cast should I remove to achieve the desired hue? Decrease the amount of the undesired colors, and increase the amount of the chosen hues till the final color matches your expectations.

Keep the Preserve Luminosity option checked, as it will preserve most of your previous contrast adjustments while you crete a new color balance for your gold effect.

You can create very interesting special effects using color balance in Photoshop. In this other example I have created a cold metal, with a modern high-tech style. It’s just an easy color adjustment, that relies mainly on increasing the amounts of Cyan (specially in the shining metallic highlights) and Blue (specially in the metal shadows).