Stargate Atlantis Tutorial
I was asked to write a tutorial for an icon that I entered for 
sga_icontest.
This tut shows you how to go from this to this:
Made in PS CS5
Translatable? Yes - uses a curves layer and layer masks.
PSD? No!
1. Take your eyedropper tool and choose the dark brown background of your picture. Make sure the brown is the background colour in your palette.
2. Crop the picture - I usually crop 300x300px, because I can see better what I do later on - but this is of course entirely up to you! As you can see the brown colour you selected becomes your background - we go for negative space here!
3. Copy your picture twice and set the first copy to soft light 100% and the next to screen 100% - this gives your icon more contrast and also lightens it up. Of course the settings depend on how dark or washed out your original picture is. You may have to adjust the settings or maybe copy the picture again and set it to screen to make it even lighter.
4. Add a curves layer - this again gives the icon more contrast and depth. My settings for this one were RGB Output 200 Input 170. Once again you may have to play with the settings to find out what suits your picture best.
My picture looks like this now:
5. Merge all layers.
6. Copy the merged layer and move the copy up to the right hand corner:
7. Select the mask button at the bottom of the layers menu, which is the button that looks like a box with a circle in it. You want to make sure your foreground colour is black. Then start brushing the edges of the top layer to erase the parts of the 2nd layer that cover John's face. Don't worry if you make a mistake - just set your foreground colour to white and brush over the "mistake" - it will undo what you did before (which is the brilliant thing about a layer mask! *g*).
8. Merge the layers.
9. Take this texture bycolorvary (Texture Set 92) and set it to screen, 100%.
10. Flip the texture by 180° and set this to screen as well.
11. This is the finished product:
12. Now you just have to resize it to 100x100px, if you started out with a larger pic.
sga_icontest.This tut shows you how to go from this to this:
Made in PS CS5
Translatable? Yes - uses a curves layer and layer masks.
PSD? No!
1. Take your eyedropper tool and choose the dark brown background of your picture. Make sure the brown is the background colour in your palette.
2. Crop the picture - I usually crop 300x300px, because I can see better what I do later on - but this is of course entirely up to you! As you can see the brown colour you selected becomes your background - we go for negative space here!
3. Copy your picture twice and set the first copy to soft light 100% and the next to screen 100% - this gives your icon more contrast and also lightens it up. Of course the settings depend on how dark or washed out your original picture is. You may have to adjust the settings or maybe copy the picture again and set it to screen to make it even lighter.
4. Add a curves layer - this again gives the icon more contrast and depth. My settings for this one were RGB Output 200 Input 170. Once again you may have to play with the settings to find out what suits your picture best.
My picture looks like this now:
5. Merge all layers.
6. Copy the merged layer and move the copy up to the right hand corner:
7. Select the mask button at the bottom of the layers menu, which is the button that looks like a box with a circle in it. You want to make sure your foreground colour is black. Then start brushing the edges of the top layer to erase the parts of the 2nd layer that cover John's face. Don't worry if you make a mistake - just set your foreground colour to white and brush over the "mistake" - it will undo what you did before (which is the brilliant thing about a layer mask! *g*).
8. Merge the layers.
9. Take this texture by
colorvary (Texture Set 92) and set it to screen, 100%.
10. Flip the texture by 180° and set this to screen as well.
11. This is the finished product:
12. Now you just have to resize it to 100x100px, if you started out with a larger pic.