User: love_sacrificed (posted by immortalje) Date: 2012-06-23 15:00 Subject: Tutorial #14 Security: Public Location: home Mood: hungry Tags: !tutorial, tutorial: icons

Once again I'm a bit behind with keeping my communities on lj and ij up-to-date. Then again, I went from trying to find a job to "start next week and find a flat while living in a pension/boarding house due to the 3 1/2 hour commute by train in one direction*

I didn't really do that much fandom wise... this was originally posted at the end of January on LJ.

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So, I won first place in Challenge 121 of severaplums back in November and never actually got around to creating a tutorial for it since I ended up being busy with rl deadlines for university, birthdays and other family events. I haven't really been doing much of anything (outside of modding season20in20 and reading fics).

We're going from to

This tutorial was made with Photoshop CS5 and uses Curves, Hue/Saturation, Gradient Map, Brightness/Contrast and Flood Fill layers.

Notes:
• unless otherwise noted, layers are set to Normal 100%
• most values are reached by randomly sliding sliders up and down or going up and down with percentages until I liked the result.

Step 1: I tried various crops, but wasn't quite satisfied with most of them. I wanted to focus on just one pumpkin, but it was next to impossible to crop this. So, the first thing I did after finding a crop I was pretty happy with, was to "fix" it. For this I used the smudge tool and carefully erased the pumpkin on the right.

to

Step 2: In the next step I decided to put more focus on the pumpkin. To achieve this, I darkened the area of the tree which pulled most of the focus so far due to it's brightness by painting over it with black. I also added some white over the pumpkin. The size of the brush (or even the brush itself) doesn't really matter as the details dissappear once it gets blurred. To blur the black and white parts, I used the Gaussian Blur set to 5,0. I then set the layer to Soft Light.

to to

Step 3: Now I decided that I needed to work a bit more on the contrast and added a Curves layer. To darken the dark parts, I picked the black pipette and clicked on a dark part (defining it as the darkest element, anything between that and black will be set to black). The same goes for white parts, only that I used the white pipette for it. Curves Layer

Since I didn't want the bright part on the left/top to be even brighter, I painted that area of the mask black so that part of the layer wouldn't affect the icon and blurred it (most likely using ctrl+f to repeat the last filter)

to

Step 4: I thought the colours were a bit bland and used the Hue/Saturation layer to up the saturation. I set the saturation to +15.

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Step 5: The Hue/Saturation layer didn't work as well as I had hoped it would, so I used a flood fill layer (#ff8a00) to increase the orange, setting it to Soft Light at 60%.

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Step 6: Now I wanted to add a bit more contrast and darkness again. This time I used a black/White Gradient Map set to Soft Light at 40%.

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Step 7: I actually don't remember why I kept this layer. I copied the previous orange flood fill layer and set it to 2% (keeping the Soft Light setting). It's possible that I just wasn't happy with it's effect and simply forgot to delete it.

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Step 8: After having worked on the orange parts of the icon, I decided that the sky was far too grey and needed more blue. So I created a new Flood Fill layer (#3c00ff) and set it to Soft Light and 30%. In order to only affect the sky, I painted the mask black for everything that wasn't supposed to be affected and blurred it (most likely using ctrl+f to repeat the last filter)

to

Step 9: I was pretty satisfied with the icon now and got ready to sharpen it. For that I merged all layers to a new layer (ctrl+shift+alt+e) and used the Unsharp Mask filter with these settings:

Strength: 55%
Radius: 0,5
Threshold: 4

to

Step 10: After sharpening the icon, I decided that I wasn't done after all. The pumpkin appeared to be too bright, so I added a Brightness/Contrast layer setting the Contrast to 100%. Then I merged all the layer into a new one again (ctrl+shift+alt+e) and turned the Brightness/Contrast layer invisible. I set the newly merged layer to Multiply at 70% and hid everything outside of the pumpkin by painting the mask black again and blurring that part to avoid jagged edges.

to

Step 11: Now I decided that the "blue" sky had to be more blue and copied the blue flood fill layer, setting it to Overlay at 20%.

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At this point I was rather happy with the colouring and decided that I was done :)

My layers looked like this:

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