Tutorial 1: Rodney McKay for Photoshop 7

This tutorial was made in Photoshop 7, although it’ll hopefully work in other programs, and requires some knowledge of layer masks, although hopefully I’ve explained it well enough. This is my first tutorial, so if anything isn’t clear, let me know.

Remember that this is meant as a set of tips and ideas. Please don’t copy it exactly, because that’d just make lost of clones, and that’ll be boring and pointless.
That said; I hope that there’s something useful in here.

We'll being going from this to this



First off, I took this cap of Rodney McKay, from Stargate Atlantis, and selected a square using the rectangular marquee tool set to fixed aspect ratio.
Then I pasted that into a new image and resized it to 100x100.



Now that looks a bit dark and weird, so I went to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and played about with the numbers until it looked a bit brighter.
Then I went to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp mask, and again, played with the settings until it looked crisp.

I then duplicated it twice. I set the middle layer to screen, and fiddled with the brightness/contrast again, so it was something like –20/10.
The top layer I desaturated and set to Soft Light.
I picked this up from somewhere ages ago, and I tend to use some variation on it for most of my bases.

The image now looks something like this.


Now for the colour.

First off I made a new layer and flood filled it with black. I set this to Colour at 45% opacity.
Then I made another layer and flood filled it with a light beige colour (something along the lines of #D8C38A should do) and set it to Multiply at 30% opacity.


Then I took a gradient, (I’m not sure who made it, but who ever it was, they’re credited in my resources post) and set it to Lighten.


I liked the way it worked on the bottom half of the icon, but the top half looked a bit weird, so I used a black to transparent gradient mask to cover up the bit of the original gradient that I didn’t want.
Click on the rectangle with the circle in it, then select the black to transparent gradient from the default gradients and apply it to the layer.



Next I made a new layer and used this brush by 77_words. I applied it 3 times, and used the sharpen tool to crispen it up a bit.


I erased the top line from it because it covered too much of Rodney’s head.


Then I took the Magic wand tool and selected the area inside the little box of the brush, and inverted the selection (Ctrl+Shift+I)


I then clicked on the layer below it (the gradient layer) and went to Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Hue and Saturation. I set the saturation to –50 and hit OK. I tried fiddling around with the hue as well, but ended up just desaturating the icon slightly.


And now for text. I’m going through a bit of a text dry spot, my wit is gone, so I’m relying on tiny text and lyrics. For my sins, I’m a big Annie Lennox fan, so I thought and decided that ‘walking on broken glass’ would fit. I messed around with various sizes and fonts, and eventually settled on Dyspepsia, set to size 4 with the spacing at 400. It was still missing something, so I took another line from the song, ‘cut too deep’ and put that in in Perpetua, all caps, bold, and with the size at 6 and the spacing at 200.


By the end of it my layers palette looked like this.




I hope that was helpful, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
(Cross posted to my icon journal)