Georgie Henley tutorial

For very pale icons with black or white backgrounds.

Program: Photshop 7.0
Difficulty: Easy.
Translatable: Yes.
PSD Included: No.

One of my first tutorials, hope it's useful!

1. First, crop and resize your image to 100x100.

2. Duplicate your base, and set it to Soft Light at 70%. This adds some contrast to the icon to work with later.

3. Looks pretty colourless, don't you think? Add a Hue/Saturation layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation) and set the saturation to 42. This makes Georgie a bit rosier and also brings out her eyes and her mouth.

4. Now for a curves layer. This should potentially dim the icon, but you'll have to play around with this to suit your image. There are two points I used here in RGB:

Input: 64, Output: 32
Input: 143: Output: 79

5. This is a bit easier to colour as she's not so shiny, and also we can toy around with brushes later. Add a new Colour Fill layer (Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Colour) of a nice earthy brown. I used #884d13, and set it to Soft Light at 80% opacity and 60% fill.

6. We'll make it even more reddy-brown here - Add a Colour Balance layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Colour Balance), with Midtones set to 11, -7 and -20. (It shouldn't do too much, don't worry) Now merge your layers. This is a good base for the last step, and it's really brought out her features.

7. For our last step we're going to bring back that glow, but more subtly. Add a new layer (don't ever forget this, I always got mighty confused with the brushes+blurring process before I figured this out) and choose the paintbrush tool. The brush should be big for the area you want to add the glow to, and set to 10%. Now add big blobs to the area (not too much, maybe four or five dots) and then go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set it to a radius of 6.0 (or whatever you think is suitable for your icon).

If you weren't too happy with the brown of the icon this should lessen it a bit, but otherwise it adds a pretty, soft glow to Georgie's face. And there you have it.

Other example:

Feedback would be lovely, and so would your results if you tried it out. C: