Editing another skin skin file.

For those of you coming from Eloh's site...Thanks for the visit I know, you were all expecting the first tutorial to be by Eloh. But then we got talking about how having someone with absolutely no artistic ability might be a better choice to write up a "how to." And my thought was let the professional work on professional stuff...Or drink.

So for this tutorial, I'll go into how to change your eyeshadow color, your skin tone a bit, and the lips.

If you are not coming from Eloh's site...the first step is to download the head template. (http://sites.google.com/site/another/resources)

I'm assuming you have gimp installed and that it's been 10 months since you last edited a skin and have forgotten most everything. (First step is to upgrade to Gimp 2.6. They made some wonderful changes since 2.4 - I'm not sure what. But people rave about it.





















So, now we have gimp 2.6, the face file and you jumped ahead and have a black screen with a lot of text you are going to ignore when you put the skins up for sale. So turn those off those layers by clicking on the eyeballs next to the layers at the top of the list (No don't delete them...They are there for your protection) (Ctrl-L should bring up the layer menu).

And then scroll down on the layer menu to lip lower 1. Right click on the layer and mouse up to duplicate. Now you have that lip gloss thing going really well. We're going to need to that extra gloss later...

Now scroll down the layer to "metalic". Left click once on the layer to select it. Then hit Ctrl-A to select all to be safe. Then go up to Color and select Levels or Curves, whichever you feel more comfortable with (I'll be using levels because that's how I learned making halftones.) So Play with the middle slider a bit on each color channel (I'm showing what happens when you only move the red mid-tone slider. I'll use the red midtone 5.28 value for now. (You are probably going to want to hit reset a lot.) Go ahead and save your file at this point. I suggest "Testhead.xcf" if you are using gimp.

I'm also going to scroll down on the layer menu to freckles and turn that layer off. Lets also scroll down to the bottom and change our base color a bit. Left click on the layer, then ctrl-a to select all. Use the color picker (Highlighted in green below) to grab the skin tone. Then lets bring up the levels again. Lets change all the midpoints this time. Red to .77, green to 1.27, and blue to 1.23. Or we can go into the color picker (Just select this tool and sample the color it should become your new foreground color). Next, double click on the foreground color (the flesh colored box at the bottom of the screenshot). This is how I usually edit my background as I tend to use the same skintone always.




















Next up, that lipstick color doesn't work for me with that skin tone. so lets scroll down to the lips.

The lipstick is on the s.red layer, so save again, then left click on the s.red layer, ctrl-a to select all (Probably not needed, just force of habit for me.) Lets go to the blue channel and change the mid-point to 1.75. Now this looks a bit unnatural. But oh well - we can fix that. We'll just make it a bit more glossy, so go up to filters, scroll to noise and then do HVS noise, or play with the others. This should give you a nice metallic looking lipstick.

So lets go ahead and save again. Then save as a .tga and merge visible layers, turn off RLE compression and Bottom left is fine.
We probably should have re-sized the image to 512x512 but we can walk around grey to everyone while we load.

Now log into SL and upload the image. I usually create a new skin first by going up to create, selecting new body part then new skin. Go ahead and wear the new skin for that newbie look and feel. Chances are this will look better then our first attempt, then again, maybe not...Now edit appearance and click on skin then head, select the file you just uploaded and voila!