My first tutorial
I was fooling around in PSP7, just trying out different techniques, and I came up with something I actually kinda liked. So I thought I'd have a go at making a tutorial. Hopefully someone will find it useful; at the very least, it helped me remember how I made the darn thing. :-P
We're going to go from
to 
.
1. Get yourself a base. I used a screencap I'd made of Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico After cropping and resizing to 100x100, I had to do Effects->Sharpen->Sharpen a couple of times to get the clarity I wanted.
2. Go to Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Turn the saturation all the way down to -100. Set blend mode to Color, opacity to 84.
3. Hmm... a little too dark. Let's do Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Brightness/Contrast. Set brightness at 33. Leave all the other settings alone.
4. Using the eyedropper tool, select the lightest color you can get from the image as your foreground color. Create a new raster layer. Apply this brush by
drave. Blend mode: Screen. Opacity: 73.
5. On the brush layer you just created, select a rectangle in the top half of the icon and do Cntrl-X to cut it out. Select another, overlapping rectangle, and cut that one out, too.
6. Now for text. I could've just typed some in, but I had a brush by [Unknown LJ tag] that fit nicely. So: create a new raster layer. Use the eyedropper to select the darkest color you can find in the image. Apply the text brush and place it where you want it. Opacity: 75.
7. Hmm... pretty, but needs a border. Apply this border brush by
brokenicon, using the same dark color as for the text. Blend mode: Burn. Opacity: 70.
Voila! It's an icon! Hope that was comprehensible. All comments and suggestions are welcome.
We're going to go from
to .1. Get yourself a base. I used a screencap I'd made of Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico After cropping and resizing to 100x100, I had to do Effects->Sharpen->Sharpen a couple of times to get the clarity I wanted.
2. Go to Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Turn the saturation all the way down to -100. Set blend mode to Color, opacity to 84.
3. Hmm... a little too dark. Let's do Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Brightness/Contrast. Set brightness at 33. Leave all the other settings alone.
4. Using the eyedropper tool, select the lightest color you can get from the image as your foreground color. Create a new raster layer. Apply this brush by
drave. Blend mode: Screen. Opacity: 73. 5. On the brush layer you just created, select a rectangle in the top half of the icon and do Cntrl-X to cut it out. Select another, overlapping rectangle, and cut that one out, too.
6. Now for text. I could've just typed some in, but I had a brush by [Unknown LJ tag] that fit nicely. So: create a new raster layer. Use the eyedropper to select the darkest color you can find in the image. Apply the text brush and place it where you want it. Opacity: 75.
7. Hmm... pretty, but needs a border. Apply this border brush by
brokenicon, using the same dark color as for the text. Blend mode: Burn. Opacity: 70. Voila! It's an icon! Hope that was comprehensible. All comments and suggestions are welcome.