Beginner's Questions
I've got a couple of quick, general questions for a beginner who's just starting out.
Regardless of which program you use, what would you say is the best approach at starting an icon? Crop, then sharpen, recolor, etc.... or do most of (not all) the image tweaking and then resize?
And with tiny text, I think it's wonderful. It adds this great texture to icons and makes them more lively. Though I love the way it looks, I can't seem to make myself use such tiny text knowing it's illegible. But I realized... in 800x600 resolution, some of it can be read. (I'm using 1024x768) So my question for this is, do you consider other screen resolutions when making your icons, or just worry about how you think it looks on your own monitor?
While I'm posting, I'd like to say thanks for this community. These tutorials have proven to be fantastic learning devices. I just started using PS7, and there were so many effects that I wasn't even aware of before seeing these tutorials. For example, the Navy layer set to 'exclusion' -- that's such a great technique and it also showed me that there's a whole range of layer options, including 'screen' and 'overlay'. You can get some really neat effects just by playing around with those. Also, I've learned that my occasional problem saving images has been due to an overloaded cache and found out that my mysterious font size inconsistency in PS7 was due to image resolution. Again, invaluable tips. So, thanks!
Regardless of which program you use, what would you say is the best approach at starting an icon? Crop, then sharpen, recolor, etc.... or do most of (not all) the image tweaking and then resize?
And with tiny text, I think it's wonderful. It adds this great texture to icons and makes them more lively. Though I love the way it looks, I can't seem to make myself use such tiny text knowing it's illegible. But I realized... in 800x600 resolution, some of it can be read. (I'm using 1024x768) So my question for this is, do you consider other screen resolutions when making your icons, or just worry about how you think it looks on your own monitor?
While I'm posting, I'd like to say thanks for this community. These tutorials have proven to be fantastic learning devices. I just started using PS7, and there were so many effects that I wasn't even aware of before seeing these tutorials. For example, the Navy layer set to 'exclusion' -- that's such a great technique and it also showed me that there's a whole range of layer options, including 'screen' and 'overlay'. You can get some really neat effects just by playing around with those. Also, I've learned that my occasional problem saving images has been due to an overloaded cache and found out that my mysterious font size inconsistency in PS7 was due to image resolution. Again, invaluable tips. So, thanks!