User: love_sacrificed (posted by immortalje) Date: 2010-04-11 22:14 Subject: Icon tutorial #9 Security: Public Location: home Mood: busy Tags: !tutorial, tutorial: icons, tutorial: textures

I got Mod's Invitation for this icon over at severalplums @LJ and this is my tutorial for it :)

I had it completely written out on Monday, but was too pressured down with two projects to add in the links... One of those two evil projects down and another one is just looking for where the damn error is.

Anyway, this tutorial will be split into two parts. The first part will be the actual icon I made and the second will be about the texture I made for it. They're solely split for neatness.
Be aware that this tutorial is image heavy!!

Both tutorials were made with Photoshop CS3. Individual features used will be listed in the notes for each tutorial.

Tutorial Part 1: Icon

Going from to

Notes:
* uses layer masks, levels and curves.
* unless otherwise stated, layers are set to Normal 100%


Step 1:
I didn't really care to have anything of the chair Leo is sitting on to be visible. So, the first thing I did was add a new layer and simply paint over the chair with black.
Since everything around it is black, I don't have to blend it in - which is a huge relief.

to

Step 2:
After having the image the way I wanted it to content wise, I decided to fix the graininess of it. The first step for that was to add a Levels layer.

I pulled the left lever up until it reached the black parts in the diagram and moved the middle one further right which makes the grey areas darker.



to

Step 3:
It still didn't look right, so I added a Curves layer. This is something that had been pointed out to me as I had tried to fix a really washed out image and I've fallen in love with it since:
At the bottom of the Curves dialog there are 2 eyedroppers. Selecting the one on the left (with the black) I picked a random area of the background. I repeated the same with the one on the right for white by chosing an area in Leo's face.

What this does is telling the program/layer what is darkest and brightest spot in the image. The Curves get automatically adjusted to this. The beauty is that it's also very useful to fix tinted images.
Be careful with picking the spots though as the image easily becomes too dark or bright. Still, you can always pick a different spot until you're sure that you hit a good one!

Since I thought that the effect was a bit too much, I reduced the opacity to 80%.

to

Step 4:
Now I had a really nice contrast. However, it's pretty impossible to see where the jacket ends and the background starts which I found a bit distracting.
The only solution I could think of was to add a texture.

I quickly tried my hand at it (see second tutorial below) and chose a nicely coloured area to crop and resize. Naturally, I didn't want any of it to cover Leo's face, so I simply added a mask and hid that area by painting it black.
After that I blurred it with a Gaussian Blur set to 13.5 and set the layer to Screen at 20%. I didn't like the result with a higher opacity, but at the same time, the effect wasn't strong enough. So I copied the layer again and set it to Pin Light at 30%.

By now, I noticed that the texture was too "close" to Leo, so I fixed both layer masks by painting over some areas and re-blurring it by hitting Ctrl+F which simply applies the last filter used without opening the window (and therefore not changing any of the settings).

to to to

Step 5:
In a final step, I decided that the image wasn't sharp enough. I knew that sharpening the original layer would be a bit problematic as that's the one layer I tend to oversharpen a lot.
To avoid that, I hid the texture layers by clicking the eye in front of the two layers. Selectung a random visible layer (preferably the Curves layer as that means I don't have to move the layer around) I hit Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to copy merge it.

What this does is create a new layer and merge all visible on it. The beauty of doing it this way is that the original layers remain there. I've found that doing this in Photoshop 7 is able to do this as well with one problem: It merges everything to the currently *selected* layer. Meaning that a new layer has to be created and selected first.

I than made the texture layers visible again, before selecting the new layer. I used an unsharp mask, setting it to 90% with a radius of 0.3. Since, predictably, I made it way too sharp, I reduced the opacity to 70%.

And now, I was finally done :)

to

My final layer palette:




Tutorial Part 2: Texture

Going from to

Notes:
* uses layer merge, levels and blur filters
* unless otherwise stated, layers are set to Normal 100%
* clicking on the images should lead to their original size.


Step 1:
Since I wanted to add some colour, my choice quickly fell onto the Disco image. As I'm used to do with rather dark images, my first step was to copy the original layer and set it to Screen.

to

Step 2:
Now I wanted to bring out the lights more and darken everything else. The easiest way to do that was to add a levels layer and pull the levers pretty close together.



to

Step 3:
Now, I put everything into a group before merging it together (see step 5 for the icon). It would have worked without the groups just as well, but I did it for organisational purposes so I would remember what I merged together.
After that, I copied the merge layer and blurred it with a Gaussian Blur set to 12.0. This copied layer was set to Screen.

to

Step 4:
Once again, I put everything into a group and merged it to a new layer and added a Surface Blur with the values 33 and 44.

to

Step 5:
Then I cropped it and resized it to be used in the icon.


And this is what my layers looked like:





If you have any questions left, feel free to ask.

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