Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

Have you ever finished a piece of art and just thought it could use… a little bit more? You can use various filters and layer blending modes to add the finishing touches to your illustrations very easily, and that’s the topic we’ll tackle this week!

In this article we will cover the following topics:

Color Overlay 

Adding Depth and Motion Blur

Tone Curve and Chromatic Aberration 

Let’s add some finishing touches to our illustration!

Color Overlay

For this week’s example I drew something that has motion and could have some very dramatic lighting in it to show off these filters and blending modes. Some of you may recognize this as the pose from the movie poster of “The Greatest Showman”! I have substituted my own characters in. The coloring is fine and it could be finished, but there are things that could be done just to add some extra pop! So let’s get started. 

First let’s add a bit of color variation by creating a new raster layer over top of the image. Now use a soft airbrush to add some colors over the image. The reference I’m working from has a warm spotlight to the right, some pinkish tones on the right, and the background is really quite dark in areas with just a bit of lighter blue around the edges. Depending on the type of lighting and mood you want to create, you may want to choose different colors in different areas of your image. 

Once you have your colors put down, set the blending mode to Overlay. 

Now adjust the layer opacity until you like the look. I went down to about 35% and also added some additional blur to the overlay layer to blend the colors some more by using the Gaussian Blur filter. I feel like this is now drawing more attention to the character’s faces while adding some lighting and variation to the colors!

Adding Depth and Motion Blur

Now let’s use some filters to add a bit of depth, motion, and also do more to subtly draw the viewer’s eyes to where we want them to focus. Now, I want to just blur parts of the characters and not the background, but the line art and colors are all on separate layers so we’ll need to do something about that first! So let’s turn off all the layers that aren’t part of the character art.

Now go to Layer - Merge visible to new layer. This will make a copy of the visible layers that we can add filters to without making changes to the original layers.

Then I turned all my hidden layers back on before using the lasso tool to select the areas that I wanted to add a blur to. This will imitate a depth of field effect in a camera so anything that I don’t want to be “in focus” will get selected.

Now let’s go to Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur. Make sure the Preview box is checked and then adjust the strength slider until you like the look of the blurry areas.

Click OK when you’re happy with the blur. 

For my particular illustration I also want to add a bit of motion blur to the hair. So I used the lasso tool to select the character’s hair, then went to Filter - Blur - Motion Blur.

I then adjusted the angle so that it matched with the angle of the hair, then adjusted the strength slider so that it was just a subtle bit of blur.

Here’s the illustration with the changes we made so far!

Tone Curve and Chromatic Aberration Adjustments

For some final touches I just want to do a little bit of color correction. So let’s start by clicking on Edit - Tonal Correction - Tone Curve. 

Then I’ll just play with the control points on the curve to make the dark areas just a bit darker and the light areas a little brighter to really make it look like the characters are in a spotlight.

This next filter I’m going to use to just add a little bit more subtle texture and color variation. If you want to see another way to use the Chromatic Aberration filter, check out this previous article by me! 

https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/9163 

I adjusted the chromatic aberration options to make the effect very subtle, and moved the center point of the filter to the characters so that they would be the focal point. Honestly this effect is so subtle that clicking and unclicking the Preview checkbox was necessary to compare the before and after! 

Below is a before and after of the finished illustration, and I love the results! The finished product definitely has a more dreamy feel, which is just what I was hoping for!

Conclusion

Giving your illustrations a beautiful finished look with a clear focal point isn’t difficult when you have digital tools like filters and layer blending modes to help you out! Do some experimenting and see what fits your personal style best!

For more information on CLIP Studio Paint, please visit https://www.clipstudio.net/en or https://graphixly.com