I came across a Wikipedia entry on leucism and thought to myself that it would probably be a fun challenge to recolor leucistic animals. In nature, it would be disadvantageous to have this type of pigmentation, so help these animals out by giving them some color. Could be realistic or imaginative. (Good thing that this has nothing to do with people; otherwise, this would be very offensive.)
It is up to you which subject you do. It could be any of the photos on the Wiki entry, or any that you discover or take yourself, as long as its license is compatible for our use. Include a link to or upload the source for us, so that we can give it a try too.
I used the gimp to generate a layer mask but it still left the problem of needing to do some very precise and in some places impossible painting. I just used edge detect with a gausian blur. One of the other facilities might be better but there would still be a painting problem to tidy it up.
Thanks for the contributions so far. I was wondering if anyone would like to attempt a more realistic entry. Edit: if you could please share your process via sidecars, etc. Thanks!
Challenge
Maybe the folks who have contributed to or have an interest in #digital-painting could give our leucistic friends a do over. Not sure if your apps have sidecar files but it would be nice to briefly discuss how you colored the creature of choice. @Elle@Reptorian@briend and others.
Must say felt elated when @afre mentioned me by name Made me compelled to give it try.
First I tried using Color Mask of GMIC. It is very good but I was not satisfied. Then thought of old fashioned technique of using Threshold filter in the Color tab of GIMP to isolate Peacock. That mask felt better to me. I know some of the feathers on the right side are left out, but did not bother to add them. Then used the Curves to individually change the R,G,B, curves to get the following image. Is the fluorescent blue peacock realistic?
Edit: Forgot to mention the final use of Tone Enhance filter of GMIC to make shadows a bit dark and rest a bit bright with 10% detail added.
Here is one with colorful neck
The background is a street I shot in Kyoto years ago…the rest (apart from the flare) is handpainted in Gimp using the mouse as I don’t have a Wacom or something similar.
The Wikipedia article on peafowl says “The number of eyespots in the train predicted a male’s mating success,” so maybe the poor bird sometimes dreams of having more normal feather colors.
I used default GIMP-2.9. The colors in the original photograph seemed not very useful, so I made a luminance conversion to black and white, sampled colors from photographs of peacocks with normal feathers, and then applied the colors using several masked layers set to LCH Color blend mode. The Hue layers ranged from 100 (yellow-green for the legs and beak) to 230 (green-blue for the body).
To get the feathers in the black and white conversion to have a dark enough tonality to actually blend with the Color layers to produce something like peacock feather colors, I made a copy of the black and white layer and inverted it, and then did a lot of blending to get the tonality to more or less the right place. Adding actual eyespots is way beyond my painting/recoloring capabilities.
I agree. I couldn’t tell from the photograph what that “thing” was, had no idea whether it was part of the bird or not. But if you say it’s a thigh, I guess it’s a thigh! I was tempted to clone it out altogether, but left it in anyway.
Made me compelled to give it try.
. Nice rendition: it is believable.
. See: