Usually, when a girl(or more rarely, a boy) starts off her dolling career, she(or he, but I'm keeping to one gender from here on) is stuck using primitive tools with primitive, undeveloped skills, and a predilection towards bright fully saturated and websafe colors. This article is primarily directed toward those who doll more realistically, as
Color saturation or "brightness" describes the richness of the color quality. An unsaturated color is close to grey, but a saturated one is vibrant and full of life. When you wear and wash an article of clothing often, it tends to loose its bright color and is faded. You could say that it lost its saturation.
When I was a small girl, I knew that there were two types of show on television. There were the bright colorful cartoons like Garfield and Inspector Gadget and there were the dull boring grown up shows like the News. I knew that I prefered the bright colors. They were prettier! So then, when we are young, the entire world is grabbing at our attention, asking us to learn about it, the bright colors of cartoons and advertisements are designed to be more saturated than the world, easier to spot. If you lined up a row of twenty black ants and placed one fireant in the middle, which would you spot first? Hopefully the fireant so you could step on it before you stung you :O But the bright red color compared to the duller (and in this case also darker) black stands out vividly.
So then, bright colors are great attention getters. However, if you like to doll more realistically, they are your enemy. As I stated, the news is shown in dull colors, colors that reflect the truth of our world. On cloudy days, not much is very bright. Even sunny days can't compare to the cartoons and comic books and billboards. If you doll realistically, be prepared to turn the slider on your saturation down very low. Even if you don't plan on being realistic, don't use full saturation. You'll find it much easier to doll if you lower the saturation to about 60-80% (about 155-205 on the 0-255 scale. Realism asks about 20-40% or 50-100 on the 0-255 scale), shading will come more naturally and be more visible. It is difficult for the human eye to discern much of a difference in shade or tone when the saturation is as high as it will go. Beware though, desaturated yellows appear dirty or even green, unless they're paired with something that is actually dark or actually green. That goes for painting too :] Mixing Yellow paint with Black makes a sickly green hue.
If you use Photoshop or Paintshop Pro (or I guess the GIMP. I haven't used it as recently as I would like:(), there is a feature called Color Balance. I suggest you open an image and start toying with it immediately.
NOTE: Color balance will, by its very nature, add saturation to your images. Expect this. If you can Color Balance, you probably have a tool called Hue/Saturation or something of that nature which will have a Desaturate option. You may need to use this.
Color balance makes it possible to create such effects in photography as bathing film in different chemicals might create. In dolling, it can help you balance the true shadows and true highlights that you would see in real life. You may have read somewhere that, to shade red, you put dark green in the shadows. This is true. This is what Color Balance can help you do.
The basic layout of CB has three sliders: one labelled Cyan >-< Red, Magenta >-< Green, and Yellow >-Blue<. Those familiar with the additive nature of light may realize that these are the opposites of each other. Those used to the subtractive nature of pigments may wonder why Red isn't paired with Green, Yellow with Violet, and Blue with Orange.
The reason is that computer monitors work in RGB or red, green and blue light diodes, which when lit up certain ways will produce different colors on the screen. With light, Red, Yellow, and Blue aren't anything special together. They are quite the rage in pigments, or physical traditional painting, crayon, etc art, but we aren't doing this. We are making cartoon dollz. On computer monitors.
Anyways, There are really nine sliders, one of each colorpair for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. When you move the red shadow slider towards red, the shadows will lighten and become more red. If you move it to the left, the shadows will darken and become more cyan(or blue green, if you like to think of it like that). If you moved the green slider to the right in the shadows slider, the shadows would become lighter and more green. To the left and darker and more magenta (or reddish violet). If you move the blue slider to the right, the shadows become lighter and more blue, left and darker and more yellow. For photos, a default move for me is to move the blue shadows slider to the left, to take out the extra blue the camera picks up, and to make the photo look more solid and prettier.
The same principals go for the Midtones and highlights. However, maybe you want your shadows redder but darker. In that case, you'd move the green and blue sliders left, about half as much as you would normally. The yellow and magenta mix to make red :] If you want a lighter yellow, move the green and red sliders right about half as much. Basically, whatever color you want, move the other two sliders the opposite way. Experiment around with this.
Now that you have the general idea of how to use Color Balance, I'll tell you how to use it. If you are like me, you never pick the right colors to begin with, and what your doll ends up with is kinda weird looking and kinda clashy. I have that problem terribly, and I'd try to go to websites to find color "harmonizers" or color matchers, and they never really helped. However, with Color Balancing, you can set the color of one part of your doll, say the shirt, to match well with the base's skin tone, and then switch to the pants or hair, and then making sure a preview box is checked, slowly go through the colors until you find some that look like they belong together. Just remember, color balancing will increase your saturation, no matter which direction the sliders go.
If you'll recall, I mentioned how shadows will generally have hues of their complement. This should guide you when you go to change your clothing's colors. If you have a blue shirt, you can either choose to take the green side or the purple side. Whichever you pick will be reflected in the midtones. For the shadows, go on the opposite side. For example, if you want a more greenerblue (not blue-green, just kinda greener than perfect blue, but far more blue than green) when editing the Shadows slider in the histogram, move the green slider down (if you want it lighter, then the blue and red sliders up) and perhaps the red slider up, depending on what colors you're starting with and also your personal taste. You may not need to touch anything but magenta. You may want to use blue instead, so it's not totally purple. This is where the experimentating in the last section comes into play. Once you get the shadows set, your midtones are already set, then in the highlights, nudge the green slider up a hair (or if it's too light already, the blue and red sliders down) and perhaps the blue also. Again, personal taste and original colors matter. Keep in mind once more your saturation levels. A good rule of thumb is when the sliders in any section of the color balance tool get further apart, the saturation increases more. Direction is irrelevant.