I posted a blog covering a new method I've been developing allowing you to index paint in Photoshop - but with a fundamentally more powerful process which retains HD data to manipulate the pixels.  It's a bit lengthy but I figured you guys would find it useful.

Blog post here:
http://danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop

Here's what you can do with it:

Pixel-bush, AA-brush, Soft-brush


Procedural Dithering


Dither Sampling


Smudge


Gradient


AA transforms


Alpha-blending


Blend Modes


Fixed index Adjustments


Dynamic index Adjustments


Dynamic re-indexing

Let me know what you think

Just wanted to give you guys a quick tip for getting work.

At my job, I'm constantly on the lookout for contractors.  A lot of companies don't want to risk hiring another full-time body, so they'll look to their art lead to manage contractors for them.  Honestly, the first place I look anytime we need a contractor is in my own contact lists.  It's really a last resort for me to start posting in the jobs forum or contact people I don't know.  So here's a tip: If you really want a good chance of getting contract gigs, make friends with people who are in a position to give them.  Be available, friendly, and good at what you do, and you'll most likely not have to look far for a stable work-schedule.  -and this often leads to full-time positions as well.

-Dan

I've been dabbling with this as of late.  Feel free to C+C along the way.

Current:


Progress:

This is something I've been pondering about lately.  I'd like to hear your thoughts...



Line B depicts how most people tend to hue shift from one color to another - simply cycling through the colors one direction or the other untill they reach their destination.  -Tweaking the saturation afterward as they see fit.  This is really easy to fall into because of the nature of most color pickers - especially HSB sliders.

Line A depicts how I've been picking colors lately.  I envision it on a colorwheel with 0% saturation in the center - then draw a straight line from point A to B.  The shortest path between the two on a color wheel.  The result of the gradient is much more smooth, and less jarring using this method as opposed to Line B.  If you take your color picker and slide accross the gradient you'll notice the saturation bar (if you're using HSB) gradually slide down, then slide back up again dynamically - Something that you wouldn't normally think about when picking colors by hand on sliders without seeing a color wheel.

But curiously, Photoshop uses some other method which I don't understand.  It's gradient goes through a narrow band of yellow - thus a *longer* path between the two colors.  The result does seem more visually direct (though technically it isn't) - the yellow in the PS gradient is much less noticable than the blue in gradient A... but then again I think PS's shift between red and green appears much more sudden than in mine.  I have no idea what it's doing.  Any thoughts?