Icon tutorial: medium-level Paint Shop Pro techniques
I've noticed that while I try my best to advise people, especially with PSP (my area of expertise), I haven't done a full-icon tutorial yet. This is partly because I prefer simple icons, but recently I found myself making one that took quite a few steps and used some of my favorite PSP techniques:
I'm using PSP8, though most of those steps should be translateable to PSP7 and 9 (with the exception of loading selections by adding them to existing ones, which appeared for the first time in PSP8), and Photoshop users can do everything except use the wonderful PSP photocorrection tools ;P Or just enjoy my blathering and theoretizing.
Warning: image-heavy, assumes basic knowledge of PSP - I don't explain how to duplicate a layer or change a blend mode.
1. PROLOGUE
We start with this screencapture from Phantom of the Opera, by Sultana of Persia, and crop it to a square. Don't resize it yet - photo correction tools work better on larger images!
2. PRELIMINARIES
The image suffers from a common malady of screencaps - high amount of JPEG noise. Screencappers don't want to kill their bandwidth and they've got tons of images, so they compress each highly. Fortunately PSP has the JPEG Artifact Removal filter, under Adjust>Add/Remove Noise. Set it to High and Crispness to 30 for this one. Look at how much definition it added to the edge of Erik's mask.
3. CORRECTING THE PHOTO
Now for the photo correction proper. With most images you just need to run the OneStepPhotoFix script (PSP8,9) which applies the photo correction tools in the order and settings that work for most images. But this needs a personal touch, since we don't want to destroy the nighttime setting or the blue tinge. Let's start with Automatic Color Balance (Photo toolbar or Adjust > Color Balance) at a temperature of 7000 and with "Remove Color Cast" unchecked (this leaves the overall nighttime blue overcast of the picture).
Next in line on PSP8 and 9's helpful Photo toolbar is Automatic Contrast Enhancement. The default setting brightens the image too much, so let's make it Neutral/Mild. And Bold, because with small pictures like LJ icons it's important to have well-defined shapes.
Finally let's use the magic of Clarify (Adjust > Brightness and Contrast). This is an adaptive contrast enhancement filter that analyzes the whole image and makes it more readable - priceless for icons. It's important to apply it before resizing, because for small images it just brightens them up overall. Let's apply it at strength 5 for the full effect.
There. Now, isn't this better? :)
4. MAKING THE BASE
Resize it to 100x100. It looks nice, but could be a bit brighter. Let's duplicate the layer and call the new one Original-Screen. And let's switch Original-Screen's blend mode to Screen. Adjust the opacity of the layer until the end effect is what you want - I ended up with an opacity of 20. Here's the finished icon base:
5. COLOURING
Now let's add a dash of colour. Red is for passion, so get the fill tool, open up the Material dialogue and choose the Duotone Red gradient that came with PSP. (It's just a two-colour gradient shading from #FF4040 to #600000.) Here are the settings I used:
And when a new layer called (imaginatively) Red is filled with that gradient, blend mode set to Darken and opacity 55:
6. BRIGHTENING
This is a bit too dark. Let's duplicate our original layer again and pull it on top of the Red layer. Switch the blend mode to Luminance and lower the opacity to 50. This preserves the red tinge of the brighter parts, but brightens up the outlines of the mask and face.
7. TEXT
Text comes now. I like to put every word and phrase on its own layer so that I can position them individually, but all layers go into one layer group called Text so that I can drag them around together should I wish to do so. This comes in handy when the words overlap each other, but it's generally a good habit for any icon - if you decide to change one word, you don't have to redo the whole thing. In this case my layers are "pretty", "when you" and "cry".
I wrote "pretty" and "cry" in Florentine Regular, and I used Pixies for "when you". I picked the blue from the Phantom's mask, pre-corrections, since I actually did the text first while making the icon. Because Florentine is a calligraphy font and Pixies is a pixel one, Pixies was far too bright - I ended up reducing the opacity of the "when you" layer to 85.
8. SELECTIONS AND ALPHA CHANNELS
Oops. The blue text is really jarring, isn't it? If the red I used had been just a plain fill, I would simply fill it at the same opacity, but I used a gradient. This will be tricky.
First, let's duplicate the Red layer and call it Red-Text. Let's drag it up over the text layers, into the same Text layer group. This makes the whole image far too red, so we'll have to get rid of the parts that aren't covering the text itself.
Go to the "pretty" layer, Select All (ctrl+A), float the selection (ctrl+F), save the selection to Alpha (Selections > Load/Save), deselect (ctrl+D). Repeat this for the other two text layers ("when you" and "cry").
Now switch to the Red-Text layer. Selections > Load/Save > Load from Alpha. Choose the first selection and load it. Go to Load from Alpha again, but now when you choose the second selection, choose operation as Add To Current Selection. Repeat this for the third selection:
Now we have a selection of all our text from three layers. Invert it (Shift+Ctrl+I) and delete it (Del) - getting rid of everything from the Red-Text layer that isn't covering some of our text. It's still a little too dark, so while we leave the blend mode at Darken, we'll lower the opacity of the Red-Text layer to 40.
9. ADDING ANOTHER IMAGE TO THE BASE
This looks kind of empty in the upper left hand corner. I considered adding more text, but that wasn't really what I was after. So why not add what Erik's thinking about?
I got a screencap of the black-and-white kiss scene from
gnomeofsol. I cropped it to a square and promoted the background to a layer. Now to soften the edges: select all (ctrl+A), go to Selections > Modify > Inside/Outside Feather, set it to Inside and 30, apply, invert selection and hit Delete. Presto!
Now let's paste it into our icon as a new layer called Kiss-Luminance on top of everything else. I had to resize it and remove the edge of Christine's head with a soft eraser (size 10, hardness 0) so it wouldn't overlap Erik's mask. The blueish tinge did not go with the colour scheme of the icon, so I switched the blend mode to Luminance and reduced the opacity to 30. It's his thoughts, after all:
But that's too indistinct. Since most of the icon is a blend of the original blues and reds from my gradient layers, I decided to add some of the blueish tinge of the kiss picture. I duplicated the Kiss-Luminance layer and called it Kiss-Hue. I switched the blend mode of this layer to Hue and the opacity to 70:
10: FINISHING TOUCH
Finally I added a one-pixel frame in the same blue I originally used for the text. On a new layer called "frame" I selected all (ctrl+A), filled with this blue, contracted the selection by 1 pixel (Selections > Modify > Contract) and deleted the selection (Del). I reduced the layer opacity to 50 so the red would show through.
This is the layer palette of my finished image, with all blend modes and opacities:
And here's the end result:
I hope this tutorial has shown you some techniques and insights that will be useful in your icon making :)
I'm using PSP8, though most of those steps should be translateable to PSP7 and 9 (with the exception of loading selections by adding them to existing ones, which appeared for the first time in PSP8), and Photoshop users can do everything except use the wonderful PSP photocorrection tools ;P Or just enjoy my blathering and theoretizing.
Warning: image-heavy, assumes basic knowledge of PSP - I don't explain how to duplicate a layer or change a blend mode.
1. PROLOGUE
We start with this screencapture from Phantom of the Opera, by Sultana of Persia, and crop it to a square. Don't resize it yet - photo correction tools work better on larger images!
2. PRELIMINARIES
The image suffers from a common malady of screencaps - high amount of JPEG noise. Screencappers don't want to kill their bandwidth and they've got tons of images, so they compress each highly. Fortunately PSP has the JPEG Artifact Removal filter, under Adjust>Add/Remove Noise. Set it to High and Crispness to 30 for this one. Look at how much definition it added to the edge of Erik's mask.
3. CORRECTING THE PHOTO
Now for the photo correction proper. With most images you just need to run the OneStepPhotoFix script (PSP8,9) which applies the photo correction tools in the order and settings that work for most images. But this needs a personal touch, since we don't want to destroy the nighttime setting or the blue tinge. Let's start with Automatic Color Balance (Photo toolbar or Adjust > Color Balance) at a temperature of 7000 and with "Remove Color Cast" unchecked (this leaves the overall nighttime blue overcast of the picture).
Next in line on PSP8 and 9's helpful Photo toolbar is Automatic Contrast Enhancement. The default setting brightens the image too much, so let's make it Neutral/Mild. And Bold, because with small pictures like LJ icons it's important to have well-defined shapes.
Finally let's use the magic of Clarify (Adjust > Brightness and Contrast). This is an adaptive contrast enhancement filter that analyzes the whole image and makes it more readable - priceless for icons. It's important to apply it before resizing, because for small images it just brightens them up overall. Let's apply it at strength 5 for the full effect.
There. Now, isn't this better? :)
4. MAKING THE BASE
Resize it to 100x100. It looks nice, but could be a bit brighter. Let's duplicate the layer and call the new one Original-Screen. And let's switch Original-Screen's blend mode to Screen. Adjust the opacity of the layer until the end effect is what you want - I ended up with an opacity of 20. Here's the finished icon base:
5. COLOURING
Now let's add a dash of colour. Red is for passion, so get the fill tool, open up the Material dialogue and choose the Duotone Red gradient that came with PSP. (It's just a two-colour gradient shading from #FF4040 to #600000.) Here are the settings I used:
And when a new layer called (imaginatively) Red is filled with that gradient, blend mode set to Darken and opacity 55:
6. BRIGHTENING
This is a bit too dark. Let's duplicate our original layer again and pull it on top of the Red layer. Switch the blend mode to Luminance and lower the opacity to 50. This preserves the red tinge of the brighter parts, but brightens up the outlines of the mask and face.
7. TEXT
Text comes now. I like to put every word and phrase on its own layer so that I can position them individually, but all layers go into one layer group called Text so that I can drag them around together should I wish to do so. This comes in handy when the words overlap each other, but it's generally a good habit for any icon - if you decide to change one word, you don't have to redo the whole thing. In this case my layers are "pretty", "when you" and "cry".
I wrote "pretty" and "cry" in Florentine Regular, and I used Pixies for "when you". I picked the blue from the Phantom's mask, pre-corrections, since I actually did the text first while making the icon. Because Florentine is a calligraphy font and Pixies is a pixel one, Pixies was far too bright - I ended up reducing the opacity of the "when you" layer to 85.
8. SELECTIONS AND ALPHA CHANNELS
Oops. The blue text is really jarring, isn't it? If the red I used had been just a plain fill, I would simply fill it at the same opacity, but I used a gradient. This will be tricky.
First, let's duplicate the Red layer and call it Red-Text. Let's drag it up over the text layers, into the same Text layer group. This makes the whole image far too red, so we'll have to get rid of the parts that aren't covering the text itself.
Go to the "pretty" layer, Select All (ctrl+A), float the selection (ctrl+F), save the selection to Alpha (Selections > Load/Save), deselect (ctrl+D). Repeat this for the other two text layers ("when you" and "cry").
Now switch to the Red-Text layer. Selections > Load/Save > Load from Alpha. Choose the first selection and load it. Go to Load from Alpha again, but now when you choose the second selection, choose operation as Add To Current Selection. Repeat this for the third selection:
Now we have a selection of all our text from three layers. Invert it (Shift+Ctrl+I) and delete it (Del) - getting rid of everything from the Red-Text layer that isn't covering some of our text. It's still a little too dark, so while we leave the blend mode at Darken, we'll lower the opacity of the Red-Text layer to 40.
9. ADDING ANOTHER IMAGE TO THE BASE
This looks kind of empty in the upper left hand corner. I considered adding more text, but that wasn't really what I was after. So why not add what Erik's thinking about?
I got a screencap of the black-and-white kiss scene from
gnomeofsol. I cropped it to a square and promoted the background to a layer. Now to soften the edges: select all (ctrl+A), go to Selections > Modify > Inside/Outside Feather, set it to Inside and 30, apply, invert selection and hit Delete. Presto!Now let's paste it into our icon as a new layer called Kiss-Luminance on top of everything else. I had to resize it and remove the edge of Christine's head with a soft eraser (size 10, hardness 0) so it wouldn't overlap Erik's mask. The blueish tinge did not go with the colour scheme of the icon, so I switched the blend mode to Luminance and reduced the opacity to 30. It's his thoughts, after all:
But that's too indistinct. Since most of the icon is a blend of the original blues and reds from my gradient layers, I decided to add some of the blueish tinge of the kiss picture. I duplicated the Kiss-Luminance layer and called it Kiss-Hue. I switched the blend mode of this layer to Hue and the opacity to 70:
10: FINISHING TOUCH
Finally I added a one-pixel frame in the same blue I originally used for the text. On a new layer called "frame" I selected all (ctrl+A), filled with this blue, contracted the selection by 1 pixel (Selections > Modify > Contract) and deleted the selection (Del). I reduced the layer opacity to 50 so the red would show through.
This is the layer palette of my finished image, with all blend modes and opacities:
And here's the end result:
I hope this tutorial has shown you some techniques and insights that will be useful in your icon making :)