User: love_sacrificed (posted by immortalje) Date: 2010-04-11 22:07 Subject: Icont Tutorial #7 Security: Public Location: home Mood: busy Tags: !tutorial, tutorial: icons

Apparently I'm not as up-to-date with posting things here as I'm at LJ. This goes for tutorials and 20in20 icon sets. I'll be posting them here shortly, starting with this tutorial...

I won first place last week over at severalplums @LJ and this is the tutorial for my winning icon.

We're going from to .

I made this icon in Photoshop CS3 (on Windows) using one filter and a Curves layer.


Introductionary notes:
* Unless otherwise stated, layers are set to Normal 100%.
* When using adjustment layers, I tend to go back to them to change either the opacity or values.
* Something I've come to find really useful: I copy the original image and put it as the top level (naming it "compare"). I use this to compare my result to the original to question myself if the image truly does look better/I didn't recreate what I started with.

Step 1:
In a first step I created a Curves layer. I used it to both lighten the icon a bit and add a bit more contrast. It's easiest to just play around with the values - and I frequently discard the Curves layer I'm working on just to start a new one because I needed to take a fresh look.

The curve looked like this:


Specifically, I used the following points:
IN/OUT
195/220
143/168
80/84

-->

Step 2
Now I copied the original layer and used the Smudge Stick filter (artistic filters) on it. I set it to 2, 0 and 10 from top to bottom and in a final step, I set this layer to Soft Light 40%.

Before settling on this filter, I tried several different ones until I was satisfied with both the dark and the light parts.

-->

Step 3
In this last step (yes - there are only 3 :) ), I wanter to further lighten up the face while darkening the rest to enhance the focus on the face. For that I created a new layer and used a random brush (usually the last one I used) and painted with white and black all over it. I then blurred the black/white using the Gaussian Blur at 23.8. Once again, this is something I tend to leave up to my previous settings (which tend to be anywhere between 8 and 25).
I set this layer to Soft Light 70%.

--> --> -->

And the icon is done!

The Layers for comparison:


If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

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