In an effort to encourage the use of experimentation beyond light textures..
Not that I don't think light textures are very, very cool I just think we need some other effects as well. I am going to be making a really cool icon that I figured out how to adapt to PSP (this is merely an adapation of an effect that I read multiple tutorials on in Photoshop..but I wanted PSP users to be able to do it too :).
General notes to start: Your image should have a lot of natural color to it already. What I mean by that is chose a screencap that has a ton of color. I didn't do like any image prep work to the screencap besides cropping it. It was just a gorgeous cap! But if you have to brighten it up and bring out the color, it should work...but make sure you do it in step one! Also I use PSP 8 I'm not sure how this will transfer, hopefully it will transfer to the other version *crosses fingers*
Step One: Cropping. I did a really boring crop..do better than me, k? Lots of tutorials on that so I won't get into that except that you should try and do free rotate and then follow up with hitting the clockwise or counter clockwise button. It puts the picture at an interesting angle. :) OH and when you resize make sure you have it set to smart resize (this makes it much more natural...I did not know this at first and my icons started out really crappy at first). Okay well that was actually kind of a tutorial wasn't it? Okay enjoy..anyway..if you are going to put any coloring changes here is your chance, make the most of it. Put on the gradient..Slap on the contrast, fade correction, whatever you want to do. I kind of was going for bright so I didn't change anything. But I'm going to leave that up to you because you are the artist.
Step two: Saving the copy. This is important! We are going to edit>copy> and then..edit>paste>as new image! Keep Charlie II off to the side we shall use him in a bit.
Step three: Negative. Now.. we are going back to the first Charlie image and we are going to make a negative of it. Duplicate the image. Adjust>Color Balance>Negative image
Step four: Grayscale: This is very important..you must hit the grayscale otherwise it won't work! :).
Image>Grayscale
Step five: Blending. Okay go to the layers pallette and change the blend mode to dodge. OMG Gunn is gone! Don't worry he's coming back :).
Step six: Blur. Some people claim that Gassian Blur works on this effect...umm I don't know it might for them but I just use the plain regular blur tool. :) Adjust>Blur> then Adjust>Blur more...I think I did two more Blur mores on Gunn. It really depends on you. Don't whatever you do over blur or the effect just won't work at all. :)
Step Seven: Color. Okay now when I first learned this effect it was just to put fake colors or to put on a gradient and hey if you want to do that go for it but what I did was I increased the color so that grayscale would go away. Then I went back to the Charlie II image that we made a long time ago that is off to the side of you screen. I hit edit>copy>edit>past as new layer. And I placed the layer in between the raster duplicate copy and the base of my original image.
Now the colors probably look weird right now...so you have to play around with the blending and opacity to find one that you really like. I ended up settling on Multiply and about 77% but do whatever you personally want it's your picture after all :).
Okay if you guys have any comments let me know or if this makes no sense ask away. :)
General notes to start: Your image should have a lot of natural color to it already. What I mean by that is chose a screencap that has a ton of color. I didn't do like any image prep work to the screencap besides cropping it. It was just a gorgeous cap! But if you have to brighten it up and bring out the color, it should work...but make sure you do it in step one! Also I use PSP 8 I'm not sure how this will transfer, hopefully it will transfer to the other version *crosses fingers*
Step One: Cropping. I did a really boring crop..do better than me, k? Lots of tutorials on that so I won't get into that except that you should try and do free rotate and then follow up with hitting the clockwise or counter clockwise button. It puts the picture at an interesting angle. :) OH and when you resize make sure you have it set to smart resize (this makes it much more natural...I did not know this at first and my icons started out really crappy at first). Okay well that was actually kind of a tutorial wasn't it? Okay enjoy..anyway..if you are going to put any coloring changes here is your chance, make the most of it. Put on the gradient..Slap on the contrast, fade correction, whatever you want to do. I kind of was going for bright so I didn't change anything. But I'm going to leave that up to you because you are the artist.
Step two: Saving the copy. This is important! We are going to edit>copy> and then..edit>paste>as new image! Keep Charlie II off to the side we shall use him in a bit.
Step three: Negative. Now.. we are going back to the first Charlie image and we are going to make a negative of it. Duplicate the image. Adjust>Color Balance>Negative image
Step four: Grayscale: This is very important..you must hit the grayscale otherwise it won't work! :).
Image>Grayscale
Step five: Blending. Okay go to the layers pallette and change the blend mode to dodge. OMG Gunn is gone! Don't worry he's coming back :).
Step six: Blur. Some people claim that Gassian Blur works on this effect...umm I don't know it might for them but I just use the plain regular blur tool. :) Adjust>Blur> then Adjust>Blur more...I think I did two more Blur mores on Gunn. It really depends on you. Don't whatever you do over blur or the effect just won't work at all. :)
Step Seven: Color. Okay now when I first learned this effect it was just to put fake colors or to put on a gradient and hey if you want to do that go for it but what I did was I increased the color so that grayscale would go away. Then I went back to the Charlie II image that we made a long time ago that is off to the side of you screen. I hit edit>copy>edit>past as new layer. And I placed the layer in between the raster duplicate copy and the base of my original image.
Now the colors probably look weird right now...so you have to play around with the blending and opacity to find one that you really like. I ended up settling on Multiply and about 77% but do whatever you personally want it's your picture after all :).
Okay if you guys have any comments let me know or if this makes no sense ask away. :)