![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A couple of people have requested an icon tutorial from me at this point. I picked a rather complex icon just to provide something different than your average tutorial out there (and because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
uiggu wanted to know how I did part of it.)
I use a huge range of methods on all my icons depending on what effect I'm going for, so this is just one of many things. If anyone would like to know how I did a specific icon or effect on my website, feel free to ask. Most of the time, I might even remember how I did it;)
I use Photoshop 7.0 with a few extra brushes from various places installed. Full list here.
1.
The first thing I do with most pictures is I crop it using the rectangular marquee tool set to a fixed aspect ration of 1 by 1. This gives you the icon square which you can easily resize to 100x100 using the image resize option under the image menu. I also tend to check if I can make the image stand out more by playing around with contrast and brightness (images/adjustments/brightness&contrast). For this image. I turned the brightness us by about 5-10 percent and the contrast up by 10-15 percent. It's pretty easy to judge if you're going too far just by previewing what you're doing. Uping the contrast means that more details will stand through no matter how many layers you throw on top of the original.
For this particular pic, Ichigo is actually surrounded by a bunch of other people, but the heavy white border around him made it relatively easy to turn the background completely green (mostly using the smudge tool if I remember correctly).
2.
I've put a black square around this one so you can see it (it's not part of the original icon) and since it's impossible to save properly, just picture that it was actually a gradient that faded from white to transparent and not the white square that appears here.
I should probably note here that none of these layers were added in the order I'm addressing them. I rearrange and build them, haphazardly trying new things until everything works, but this is how the final icon ended up, layer by layer. This one was a simple white to transparent gradient so I could make the lower, left corner glow more with the layer options set to 'Overlay' with opacity set at 62%.
3.
The black in the background and border have once again been added in for viewing purposes and weren't in the original icon.
This was another layer added to make the left side of the icon glow. There's a brush on photoshop 7 that makes nice concentrations of glowing specks (a quick check tells me it's called the 'scattered dry brush' if that helps) which I ran over the side of the icon. I did it a few different times (erasing the tries that didn't work) until I had the look I wanted. The layer is set to normal at 100% opacity.
4.
This is a brush from misprinted type that I used to add a bit of texture. The layer is set to 'soft light' at 100% opacity which is great for adding texture without obscuring your picture.
5.
This one is a bit complex. The entire layer is once again set to 'soft light' at 100% opacity. I wanted the butterflies in the background since they're a symbol of death in the Bleach universe, but also, Ichigo's face was beginning to look a little washed out from all the white being overlayed. So, right above the butterfly brush on photoshop is a brush called petal crystals, which I ran over Ichigo's face and clothing to make them dark enough to stand out. The butterfly brush beneath it is kinda weird since it provides different colours and can be upredictable in its placement of butterflies, so I did the butterflies one at a time, erasing all the tries that didn't look like they were placed right and adjusted the colour (images/adjustments/hue&saturation/light/-100%) so that they were completely black.
6.
My apologies if this one is hard to see, but basically it was the font 'Dael Calligraphy' at 12 pt. If you want to tilt text easily on photoshop 7, you want to create a text box before you start typing (instead of just clicking and typing) by clicking and dragging before you start. This will give you little handles to adjust the angle and size of the text box, but you'll need to click off the text and use the move tool to move the text around. Since the picture of Ichigo had a thick white border already, I added a 2 pixel border to the text by clicking on the little f in a black circle at the corner of the layers palette which allows you to edit the layer style. The layer style is a really fun thing to play around with, but that's an entirely different tutorial... I clicked on stroke, set the colour to the same white as was used in the picture (using the eyedropper tool) and set it to 2 pixels. The text itself is black so it stands out and looks similar in style to the actual picture.
7.
A simple layer courtesy of a trick I picked up fromteh_indy. You use paint bucket to lay down a layer of dark blue, then set the layer to exclusion. Any dark colour works, but blue seems to draw out the colour the best in general. All the darker colours on your original photo turn a deep blue which can alternatively look very good or very stupid depending on the effect and look you're going for, not to mention on your original photo.
8.
Another simple layer. I often layer a very light, slightly peach colour over photos to make them off white. This one's on colour burn because I didn't like how glaring the white was against the rest of the colours. With this layer, everything became a nice glowing yellow.
The final icon:
C'est fini:)
uiggu wanted to know how I did part of it.)I use a huge range of methods on all my icons depending on what effect I'm going for, so this is just one of many things. If anyone would like to know how I did a specific icon or effect on my website, feel free to ask. Most of the time, I might even remember how I did it;)
I use Photoshop 7.0 with a few extra brushes from various places installed. Full list here.
1.
The first thing I do with most pictures is I crop it using the rectangular marquee tool set to a fixed aspect ration of 1 by 1. This gives you the icon square which you can easily resize to 100x100 using the image resize option under the image menu. I also tend to check if I can make the image stand out more by playing around with contrast and brightness (images/adjustments/brightness&contrast). For this image. I turned the brightness us by about 5-10 percent and the contrast up by 10-15 percent. It's pretty easy to judge if you're going too far just by previewing what you're doing. Uping the contrast means that more details will stand through no matter how many layers you throw on top of the original.
For this particular pic, Ichigo is actually surrounded by a bunch of other people, but the heavy white border around him made it relatively easy to turn the background completely green (mostly using the smudge tool if I remember correctly).
2.
I've put a black square around this one so you can see it (it's not part of the original icon) and since it's impossible to save properly, just picture that it was actually a gradient that faded from white to transparent and not the white square that appears here.
I should probably note here that none of these layers were added in the order I'm addressing them. I rearrange and build them, haphazardly trying new things until everything works, but this is how the final icon ended up, layer by layer. This one was a simple white to transparent gradient so I could make the lower, left corner glow more with the layer options set to 'Overlay' with opacity set at 62%.
3.
The black in the background and border have once again been added in for viewing purposes and weren't in the original icon.
This was another layer added to make the left side of the icon glow. There's a brush on photoshop 7 that makes nice concentrations of glowing specks (a quick check tells me it's called the 'scattered dry brush' if that helps) which I ran over the side of the icon. I did it a few different times (erasing the tries that didn't work) until I had the look I wanted. The layer is set to normal at 100% opacity.
4.
This is a brush from misprinted type that I used to add a bit of texture. The layer is set to 'soft light' at 100% opacity which is great for adding texture without obscuring your picture.
5.
This one is a bit complex. The entire layer is once again set to 'soft light' at 100% opacity. I wanted the butterflies in the background since they're a symbol of death in the Bleach universe, but also, Ichigo's face was beginning to look a little washed out from all the white being overlayed. So, right above the butterfly brush on photoshop is a brush called petal crystals, which I ran over Ichigo's face and clothing to make them dark enough to stand out. The butterfly brush beneath it is kinda weird since it provides different colours and can be upredictable in its placement of butterflies, so I did the butterflies one at a time, erasing all the tries that didn't look like they were placed right and adjusted the colour (images/adjustments/hue&saturation/light/-100%) so that they were completely black.
6.
My apologies if this one is hard to see, but basically it was the font 'Dael Calligraphy' at 12 pt. If you want to tilt text easily on photoshop 7, you want to create a text box before you start typing (instead of just clicking and typing) by clicking and dragging before you start. This will give you little handles to adjust the angle and size of the text box, but you'll need to click off the text and use the move tool to move the text around. Since the picture of Ichigo had a thick white border already, I added a 2 pixel border to the text by clicking on the little f in a black circle at the corner of the layers palette which allows you to edit the layer style. The layer style is a really fun thing to play around with, but that's an entirely different tutorial... I clicked on stroke, set the colour to the same white as was used in the picture (using the eyedropper tool) and set it to 2 pixels. The text itself is black so it stands out and looks similar in style to the actual picture.
7.
A simple layer courtesy of a trick I picked up from
teh_indy. You use paint bucket to lay down a layer of dark blue, then set the layer to exclusion. Any dark colour works, but blue seems to draw out the colour the best in general. All the darker colours on your original photo turn a deep blue which can alternatively look very good or very stupid depending on the effect and look you're going for, not to mention on your original photo. 8.
Another simple layer. I often layer a very light, slightly peach colour over photos to make them off white. This one's on colour burn because I didn't like how glaring the white was against the rest of the colours. With this layer, everything became a nice glowing yellow.
The final icon:
C'est fini:)
