First icon tutorial - playing with inversion
Hi there!
I've been lurking here for a while and am still amazed of what people here come up with!
So today, when I was playing around with Photoshop CS, I realized that I've actually never read about Inversion being used, and so I decided to make a tut about how to make this
from this
This is my first tutorial, so please be gentle on me :)
I'd like to note that this is not a tutorial to be copied 1/1. I'd like to know what you came up with, though! :)
First, I took this photo of the wonderful Bela B Felsenheimer (with some weird guys I have no idea of who they are) as a base, because I absolutely loved the blue background colour:
Cropped and resized it to 200x200 px (my preferred working size. I always make icons 200x200 and resize them afterwards because I find it easier to work on a bigger picture. Do what you like.)
I played around with the selective colours because I always to that first (click twice on the layer in the layer box before to make it able to do this), and the levels. Then, I used the blur tool (on 30%) on the skin to make it look soft and not pixelish. I ended up with this:
I made a layer with a fleshy tone (#DEC79C), set it on Exclusion and 16% Opacity, and erased everything that was on the blue background (remember, that was why I chose the pic in first place. I worked on it with the Levels to make it more intensive, and I absolutely didn't intend on making it look duller again):
Now, I put text on it in the same fleshy tone (#DEC79C) I used on the Exclusion layer:
You'll notice the colour difference between the THUMBS and the UP (BTW, I used Highlight LET. I believe I got it from dafont.com, but I'm not sure. It might have been on my PC). That's because accidentally, I put the layers in two different places, the THUMBS under the Levels Mask, the UP on top of it. I didn't notice until later, but I liked it.
Then, I created a new layer and hit INVERT in the Adjustments palette, erasing the new layer immediately. I don't even know if you need to do that, but it gives me a certain feeling of security :)
Inverted people always look kind of funny to me. But I saw that the blue turns to a wonderful shade of gold when I marked the text, and I decided it would fit to the background. So I erased everything of the mask that was on Bela with a soft brush (diameter 17; Hardness 0) to give him a cool outline, and some corners to let the blue shine through again:
Now, your Layer Palette should look like this:
Final step, resize to 100x100 px, and if you like, make a 1 px border around it (I didn't, because I generally dislike them for no particular reason) or use brushes on it (which I didn't do, either^^).
Well, that was pretty easy, wasn't it?
I've been lurking here for a while and am still amazed of what people here come up with!
So today, when I was playing around with Photoshop CS, I realized that I've actually never read about Inversion being used, and so I decided to make a tut about how to make this
from this
This is my first tutorial, so please be gentle on me :)
I'd like to note that this is not a tutorial to be copied 1/1. I'd like to know what you came up with, though! :)
First, I took this photo of the wonderful Bela B Felsenheimer (with some weird guys I have no idea of who they are) as a base, because I absolutely loved the blue background colour:
Cropped and resized it to 200x200 px (my preferred working size. I always make icons 200x200 and resize them afterwards because I find it easier to work on a bigger picture. Do what you like.)
I played around with the selective colours because I always to that first (click twice on the layer in the layer box before to make it able to do this), and the levels. Then, I used the blur tool (on 30%) on the skin to make it look soft and not pixelish. I ended up with this:
I made a layer with a fleshy tone (#DEC79C), set it on Exclusion and 16% Opacity, and erased everything that was on the blue background (remember, that was why I chose the pic in first place. I worked on it with the Levels to make it more intensive, and I absolutely didn't intend on making it look duller again):
Now, I put text on it in the same fleshy tone (#DEC79C) I used on the Exclusion layer:
You'll notice the colour difference between the THUMBS and the UP (BTW, I used Highlight LET. I believe I got it from dafont.com, but I'm not sure. It might have been on my PC). That's because accidentally, I put the layers in two different places, the THUMBS under the Levels Mask, the UP on top of it. I didn't notice until later, but I liked it.
Then, I created a new layer and hit INVERT in the Adjustments palette, erasing the new layer immediately. I don't even know if you need to do that, but it gives me a certain feeling of security :)
Inverted people always look kind of funny to me. But I saw that the blue turns to a wonderful shade of gold when I marked the text, and I decided it would fit to the background. So I erased everything of the mask that was on Bela with a soft brush (diameter 17; Hardness 0) to give him a cool outline, and some corners to let the blue shine through again:
Now, your Layer Palette should look like this:
Final step, resize to 100x100 px, and if you like, make a 1 px border around it (I didn't, because I generally dislike them for no particular reason) or use brushes on it (which I didn't do, either^^).
Well, that was pretty easy, wasn't it?