User: love_sacrificed (posted by immortalje) Date: 2010-04-11 22:11 Subject: Icon tutorial #8 Security: Public Location: home Mood: busy Tags: !tutorial, tutorial: icons

I won First Place over at severalplums @LJ and this is my required tutorial for the winning icon :)

We're going from this to .

This icon was made in Photoshop CS3 and uses masks, a gradient map and levels.


Notes:
* Unless otherwise stated, layers are set to Normal 100%.

Cropping: (Full Picture of Keira Knightley)
I had tried several crops for this image, as both the skirt was very inviting as well as crops showing a lot of the wall.
When making several crops from one image, I tend to make all possible crops I can think of at once. So, effectively, I make one crop, resize and pull it into a blank image (100x100). Then I go to the protocol and undo the resizing and cropping before repeat the process until I have all crops I can think of.

Having all crops neatly lined up, I sometimes discard crops before I even got to work on because I just don't like them or because two crops are very similar and I decide to do just the "better" of the two.
The same thing might happen after I've worked on one crop. Especially if I had trouble with the colouring because the area cropped is just too dark/bright to really work with.

Never be afraid to try different crops or to discard them again. If you're not happy with the crop, it might very well effect how happy you are with the colouring.

Step 1:
The first thing I did was finding a nice texture to use for the "empty" space on the left. Normally, I do textures last, when I realise that something's "missing". This time, I knew that I wanted to use one and I figured it'd be easier to work with it colouringwise instead of finding a texture that fits the colouring.

I ended up using this made by sixtysixheavens @LJ.

Setting it to Screen at 70%, I erased part of the red over the face. The texture is supposed to enhance the icon after all, not overpowering it by hiding part of the person after all.

to

Step 2:
In previous attempts the colouring had left me witless, so I decided to make it a b/w icon.
My favourite method to turn an image into b/w is to use a b/w gradient map. The easiest way for it, is to make sure that the foreground and background colours are set to default (there's a smaller image over the field where you can reset it). Going through Layers>Adjustment Layers>Gradient Map (or directly through the layer palette), it should take the colours straight from the currently active colours (black and white in this case).

Since, I wanted the texture to remain coloured, I added this layer under the texture.

Naturally, there are others ways to make an image b/w. You should try all of them to see which one works best for you!

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Step 3:
The b/w is a bit flat, so I added a Levels layer between the Gradient Map and the texture.

I moved the white lever (right side) to where the black starts (the black=pixels in the image) at about 236 and the grey level a bit to the left, stopping at 0,73.



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Step 4:
To highlight the dress and Keira some more, I added a new layer and painted on it in black. The size and form of the brush doesn't really matter, as it gets blurred anyway.

Setting the layer to Soft Light, the area with the black gets darkened, making the area not covered appear lighter.

With darker images, it can be done in reverse - the area you want highlighted is drawn over with white instead.

I blurred the black with a gaussian blur at 11.3 so the edges of the black aren't visible anymore.

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Step 5:
Now I had reached a point, where I thought that the b/w didn't work after all. At least not for the dress. So I copied the original layer and pulled it to the top. I wanted to keep the b/w for the wall though.
Therefore, I added a mask and masked everything by making the mask black before revealing Keira by painting "over" her, making sure that I was painting on the mask.

I set the Layer to Colour at 70%.

Since I couldn't see any lines where the colour "fades" badly into the b/W I didn't add a blur as I usually do for masks.

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Step 6:
I was pretty much done, but I thought that Keira looked a bit pale. So I added a new layer and painted over the face and the arms with a skin tone (#ffbc53) before bluring it with a Gaussian Blur set tp 3.9.

I set this layer to Soft Light at 90%.

Since the effect wasn't strong enough, I copied the layer and reduced the opacity to 40%. And now I was all done.

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And this is how my layer palette looked like at the end: