Photoshop Elements Tutorial
tutorial under the cut
This tutorial is for Photoshop Elements, but it should translate to other versions of Photoshop and PaintShop Pro.
I started with a picture of Ayumi Hamasaki (courtesy of Superior Pics).
Cropped it, sharpened and lightened to my liking, and got this:
Duplicated the base, set it to overlay, opacity 100
Created a new layer, filled it with #060C43 and set it to exclusion, opacity 100
Just for the hell of it, I duplicated the base, dragged it to the top and set it to soft light, opacity 20
Looked kinda bland, so I created another layer, filled it with #060C43, and set it to multiply, opacity 100
I liked the coloring at that point but wanted to add more to the icon (obviously), so I created another layer and used a brush by
saniagreenleaf, in #000000, set to normal, opacity 100
I kinda liked that, but needed to fill those spaces with something, so why not three tiny Ayumis? I made the border layer invisible (by clicking on that little 'eye' thing next to the layer), then hit Ctrl+A to select all and then Shift+Ctrl+A to copy merged. Then I pasted it in a new image. I went back to my Ayumi icon and made the border visible (again, by clicking on where the 'eye' thing was) and minimized that image for a minute so I wouldn't get too confused.
On the new image, I cropped the pic so it only showed Ayumi's face, then after some trial and error got her face resized to 26x11 pixels. Then, again I selected all (Ctrl+A), copied merged (Shift+Ctrl+A) and minimized the image to get it out of the way.
Restored the original Ayumi icon (the one with the border), created a new layer and pasted the resized Ayumi. Then used Ctrl+T (free transform) to place it in the first box. Then I duplicated that layer and moved it to align with the second box, and again for the third box. Then I did some rearranging and a bit of erasing so nothing was sticking out. Once done with that I merged the three layers down to one and moved it below the border layer.
Still not satisfied with the coloring, I duplicated the 'little pics' layer, desaturated it (Ctrl+U, Saturation -100) and set it on hard light, opacity 100.
Now all I needed was some text, so on a new layer, I typed AYUMI in all caps, Arial size 9, bold italic, with a space between each letter. It didn't look right so I duplicated the text layer and set the bottom on overlay, opacity 100, and the top on normal, opacity 80. Finally, I liked the look of the whole thing, so I flattened all the layers and voila- an icon.
Here's the layers palette before the flatening:
Feedback will be highly appreciated :)