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How to do a Jersey Change +intro 2 adjustment layers/layer masking
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<div align="center">HOW TO DO A JERSEY CHANGE
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1 – Download and cut your render.
Honestly, this is sometimes the hardest part of doing jersey changes. It’s not too tricky though. That said, for this one I’m using one of Copenhagen’s HQ pre-cut renders (thank you Cope!!Wink, because I’m lazy and this tutorial is less about render work, more about the basics of a jersey change.
If you really want to love yourself (who doesn’t), you’ll want to pick a render whose jersey already kind of compliments the shape of your logo. I’m doing a Wolfpack jersey change here, and so I know that I’ll prefer a logo that is fairly circular. Since the Buffalo logo is also circular, I’m choosing this Ennis render of Cope’s to start with.

[Image: tY4fiSs.png]

2 – Add the logo, resize and warp as necessary.
I like to add the logo and make any necessary adjustments to it before I start messing with color since I don’t have a great natural eye for matching things.
If you open it as a separate, pre-cut PNG, you can choose to duplicate the layer onto the render with a right-click…

[Image: JFlstKD.png]

…Where it will show up and you can move it as you like.

[Image: SEp27h8.png]

In this one we can see that the logo is fairly flat, which is nice, because it means it won’t require a lot of warping to look natural. It will, however, need a tiny bit of rotation as the Sabres logo is slightly off-center. Remember that you can hold the ‘Shift’ key as you drag the corners to make it retain its original proportions, and then hover underneath the bottom middle transform box to make the rotation option appear.

If you’ve chosen a logo where it doesn’t line up quite correctly, you’ll need to use the Clone Stamp tool to create a flat-colored surface to work from. Here you can see that, despite the circular logo not needing much fussing, the ‘Buffalo’ will still need to be removed:

[Image: Do0ljoj.png]

So we’re going to grab the clone stamp tool from the sidebar and, essentially, ‘buff it out’.
The key to getting a good clone is defining a good source point—small enough, near enough, and similarly shaded enough to your target area that it won’t look weird to replace it.

To define your source point, hold down the ‘Alt’ key and a little target will come up. Click to define your source point. You can move your source around as much as you want—when you start to stray fairly far from your original point, you can see that elements you don’t want to clone will begin to come up in the Clone Stamp preview. Just move the source point back to a cleaner area and begin again.

With the Clone Stamp tool highlighted in red, you can see that I’ve removed the BUFFALO text from above the swapped logo.

[Image: ZTfAhhp.png]

Next let’s move to color.

This part is easy if you’ve worked with adjustment layers and layer masks before. If not, don’t panic. They aren’t particularly difficult to learn, and improve your overall skillset very quickly.

So you can see in this one that the jersey has three colors: white, navy, and gold. The white I’ll leave alone since the Wolfpack also uses it. Since the yellow is a ‘richer’ color and the navy is less so, I’ll turn the yellow to the Kelly green of the wolfpack logo and turn the navy to black.

Blacks first as the adjustment is easier…

Make the adjustment layer first. Be aware that it’s gonna color the whole damn render. DO NOT WORRY. Layer masking will take care of this, and this is the best way to ensure you get nice color retention without trying to refine selections or any of that nonsense.
Open the adjustment layers drop-down (circled in red) and choose ‘Hue/Saturation’.

[Image: 0JQwJan.png]

Changing a dark color to black is nearly always easy to get to cooperate because black is, by default, nature’s least saturated color. Turn that bar all the way down and you get this:

[Image: s2pgaxI.png]

So that’s all well and good, but you only want the navy parts blackened, right? So now we go ahead and we make a layer mask.

Your layer mask here is acting as an adjustment to the adjustment layer. For our purposes, layer masks are binary and operate by ‘painting’ with two colors: white and black. You either do want to keep the adjustment (white) or you want to remove the adjustment you just made (black).

So now we’re gonna add our layer mask. Make sure your ‘Hue/Saturation’ is the layer that’s highlighted, and then hit this button:

[Image: isV3Y40.png]

To add a mask to it:

[Image: PEzR3ef.png]

By default the entire layer mask is white, which assumes that you want to keep the entire adjustment you made. So, you will need to select the mask (it’s selected by default normally, but just in case), grab your black paintbrush (you can select your Brush tool quickly with the ‘B’ key if you like), and paint right onto the render.

[Image: 0iFJj3y.png]

So I’m pausing here to show you how the mask works, mostly because I’m an idiot and had a really tough time grasping them before I started using them regularly. You can see that everywhere I’ve painted on the render in black (which ‘reverts’ the jersey back to yellow), a black bit shows up within the mask itself (highlighted in red on the right-hand side). You can also see that I’ve still got some yellow left to put back in, and I’m also feeling kind of perfectionist about that helmet, so I’ll black in the rest of the details on the layer mask and clone-stamp out that Sabres thing on the helmet. Then we’ll move onto making the yellow a nice Wolfpack green.

[Image: jySknQC.png]

Since this is a repeat of the previous step, I won’t go into too much depth here. Grab another adjustment layer, adjust the hue/saturation/lightness to your preference, and then make a layer mask and paint that shit in.

[Image: r73Sc9A.png]

And there’s your outcome after that step
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Mastering the color change can be tough, so take your time and play around with those sliders a lot, especially the first couple of times you do it. I like to rough in the Hue bar first so I’m close-ish (I have a green chosen instead of, say, a yellow or a blue), work with the saturation and lightness until I’m fairly confident I’m in the right neighborhood in terms of shade, and then move the Hue around again in a tighter window and do some tweaking until I find the right spot for each.

So here, I have a nicely- colored jersey, but the logo still looks kind of ‘stuck on’. In all likelihood, some of it will get blurred anyway as you start working with your render for a sig, but I personally do like to reduce that out front if I can. In this case I am going to go ahead and do some warping of the logo.

I decided to leave the warping for the last step on this particular jersey change, because the logos were so easy to interchange that I figured I’d wait and see how it looked at the end to start messing with it. In my mind, warping the logo so it looks less pasted-on, more realistic is the difference between an okay jersey change and a really good one.
The warp tool is in your transform tools, you can see I’ve got it on in the upper-right corner of the screen here:

[Image: j5VpBTj.png]

Basically you’re gonna take each fixed point it gives you and do little tiny adjustments to make it look more ‘true to life’. As you can see above, it doesn’t have to be huge to make a difference.

[Image: fbmkD3q.png]

And I’m definitely happier with that than I was a few minutes ago.

Add any last little tweaks you want at this step. One thing I like to do is add a bit of noise to the logo itself so it doesn’t look so bland, probably about 8%. You can do this by clicking on the logo layer, then click Filter->Noise->Add noise in the top bar and messing about with the settings until you’re happy with it.

[Image: OoJag5z.png]

At this point, I’m more than satisfied. Again, if your final goal is a sig it definitely doesn’t have to be perfect, because more than likely you’ll be resizing it and blurring the details anyway. If you like how it looks here, you can go ahead and merge all of your layers down so you end up with one single, unified, jersey-changed layer!

Go to the sidebar, right-click on your top layer (which at this point should still be your logo), click ‘Merge Visible’….and you’re done!

Now you can duplicate your render onto your sig canvas and go from there. Your render will likely need more blending edits, but you can proceed at this point with a properly-colored render.

Congratulations on your first jersey change, and thanks for reading. Hope this tutorial helped you!
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