My Second Tutorial Ever
The subject of today's tutorial will be going over how to make an icon that combines the use of Black&White with color, going from this cap to make:
into 
Please note that I'm using PSP8, but I looked up how to do some of the steps in PS (and for Mac users), so it should be very easily translatable.
Step One: As with all iconning the first step is to select a cap and crop it. With this cap by
tehshroom I chose to crop against the line of his body, starting with his face, because I wanted to include some of the background. Background is very important as a contrast for icons like this.
The first thing I did was line up the top of the select tool (set to square) against the top most part of his face at the right corner and pulled down until I reached what I like to call a "natural stopping point", which was in this case the edge of the balcony.
Step Two: Once I had the image selected, by using copy->paste as new image, I then sharpened it twice and resized it to 100x100 pixels. This is the image I ended up with:
Step Three: Now, as with most my icons, the thing I did immediately afterwards was duplicated the base layer three times, leading to me having a 'Copy of Raster 1', 'Copy (2) of Raster 1', and 'Copy (3) of Raster 1'. I set Copy and Copy (2) to Screen and Copy (3) to Soft Light, and then sharpened Copy (3) and ended up with this:
Much brighter and easier to work with, isn't it?
Step Four: Because I'm going through a green phase I wanted to make the image greener. I use PSP8 and thus I went to 'Adjust->Color Balance->Manual Color Correction' to do so and used the Vegetable-Artichoke setting to replace all the pinkish color with green. This isn't a necessary step, but I recommend you play around with the colours, adjusting first one layer and then another to see what you end up with.
In this case, I adjusted the original Raster 1, Copy (2), and Copy (3) all to a green tone. The result:
The key here is to make the image colorful and with a decent amount of contrast, regardless of what color you decide to use.
Step Five:I immediately Copy Merged by right-clicking on the image and selecting that from the menu (you can also Merge All over on the tool menu, but I prefer to do it this way), and pasted that as a New Image.
Step Six, A (for PSP): Then I selected the tool on the menu that looks like a little half-black, half-white circle which is the Lighten-Darken tool and scrolled down to the tool which is is a half-blue,half-grey little circle. This is the Saturation Brush.
With the Saturation Brush set to Circle shape; Size 9; Hardness 50; Step 32; Thickness, Density, and Opacity all 100; hold down the right mouse button (the left mouse button adds Saturation, which will cause a very different effect) very carefully and slowly paint the part of the selection which you want to be black and white. If you want to do this in steps, if you're new at this, then let go of the left mouse button periodically so that you can 'Undo Step' without undoing all of your de-saturation.
Step Six, B (for PS): For those of you who have PS the easiest way I know of to do it is Duplicate the layer once again and then press Ctrl+U (or Shift-Cmd, for Mac users) to desaturate the entire image. Then use the eraser brush, at the appropriate size (similar to those above, for which PS does have equivalent settings) and erase the part you want to stay colored.
Again, erase carefully because any outside the edges erasing will be very obvious by the end.
In this case I did the A step, because I have PSP, and tried two different things. First, I de-saturated only his gun and jacket and got this:
Then I decided to try the opposite and de-saturated his skin and the background instead and got this:
With the green I decided that the former looked better and went ahead with it.
Step Seven: Then I went to my usual step of adding brushes and effects as applicable. I'm going through a phase with boxes inside of boxes right now, so what I did was resize the whole icon to 80x80 pixels, sharpen it once, and copy it.
Then I created a new image, 100x100 in size, color black, and pasted my 80x80 image of Ford inside of it, moving Ford to the top right corner.
Then I tried black and decided I liked it better:
Step Eight: Then I decided to spruce the image up a little and used the marquee/present shape tool, set to square, to draw four lines of varying thickness about the image.
Step Nine: It still seemed unfinished to me so what I was put in text, in this case 'FORD, Aiden' in Size 8, Stroke 0, Kerning 406, with Mom's Typewriter, a font which has come into fashion lately.
First I created a white layer (white font), and then duplicated it, but it of course didn't show up on the white lines so I duplicated it again and changed that font color to black. Of course, then the black didn't show up on the black part of the icon and so I selected the eraser tool, set it to Square Shape, Hardness 100, Size >80 (so as to get the whole line in), Opacity 100, and erased all of the top half of the black font layer.
That's it.
Note how the image looks completely different when put on a different color background, however. Just to get an idea of how it might look in a Boxer layout, for example:
If you have any questions, comments, or examples of where you did this yourself using this tutorial please feel free to share. Thanks!
- Andrea.
into Please note that I'm using PSP8, but I looked up how to do some of the steps in PS (and for Mac users), so it should be very easily translatable.
Step One: As with all iconning the first step is to select a cap and crop it. With this cap by
tehshroom I chose to crop against the line of his body, starting with his face, because I wanted to include some of the background. Background is very important as a contrast for icons like this. The first thing I did was line up the top of the select tool (set to square) against the top most part of his face at the right corner and pulled down until I reached what I like to call a "natural stopping point", which was in this case the edge of the balcony.
Step Two: Once I had the image selected, by using copy->paste as new image, I then sharpened it twice and resized it to 100x100 pixels. This is the image I ended up with:
Step Three: Now, as with most my icons, the thing I did immediately afterwards was duplicated the base layer three times, leading to me having a 'Copy of Raster 1', 'Copy (2) of Raster 1', and 'Copy (3) of Raster 1'. I set Copy and Copy (2) to Screen and Copy (3) to Soft Light, and then sharpened Copy (3) and ended up with this:
Much brighter and easier to work with, isn't it?
Step Four: Because I'm going through a green phase I wanted to make the image greener. I use PSP8 and thus I went to 'Adjust->Color Balance->Manual Color Correction' to do so and used the Vegetable-Artichoke setting to replace all the pinkish color with green. This isn't a necessary step, but I recommend you play around with the colours, adjusting first one layer and then another to see what you end up with.
In this case, I adjusted the original Raster 1, Copy (2), and Copy (3) all to a green tone. The result:
The key here is to make the image colorful and with a decent amount of contrast, regardless of what color you decide to use.
Step Five:I immediately Copy Merged by right-clicking on the image and selecting that from the menu (you can also Merge All over on the tool menu, but I prefer to do it this way), and pasted that as a New Image.
Step Six, A (for PSP): Then I selected the tool on the menu that looks like a little half-black, half-white circle which is the Lighten-Darken tool and scrolled down to the tool which is is a half-blue,half-grey little circle. This is the Saturation Brush.
With the Saturation Brush set to Circle shape; Size 9; Hardness 50; Step 32; Thickness, Density, and Opacity all 100; hold down the right mouse button (the left mouse button adds Saturation, which will cause a very different effect) very carefully and slowly paint the part of the selection which you want to be black and white. If you want to do this in steps, if you're new at this, then let go of the left mouse button periodically so that you can 'Undo Step' without undoing all of your de-saturation.
Step Six, B (for PS): For those of you who have PS the easiest way I know of to do it is Duplicate the layer once again and then press Ctrl+U (or Shift-Cmd, for Mac users) to desaturate the entire image. Then use the eraser brush, at the appropriate size (similar to those above, for which PS does have equivalent settings) and erase the part you want to stay colored.
Again, erase carefully because any outside the edges erasing will be very obvious by the end.
In this case I did the A step, because I have PSP, and tried two different things. First, I de-saturated only his gun and jacket and got this:
Then I decided to try the opposite and de-saturated his skin and the background instead and got this:
With the green I decided that the former looked better and went ahead with it.
Step Seven: Then I went to my usual step of adding brushes and effects as applicable. I'm going through a phase with boxes inside of boxes right now, so what I did was resize the whole icon to 80x80 pixels, sharpen it once, and copy it.
Then I created a new image, 100x100 in size, color black, and pasted my 80x80 image of Ford inside of it, moving Ford to the top right corner.
Then I tried black and decided I liked it better:
Step Eight: Then I decided to spruce the image up a little and used the marquee/present shape tool, set to square, to draw four lines of varying thickness about the image.
Step Nine: It still seemed unfinished to me so what I was put in text, in this case 'FORD, Aiden' in Size 8, Stroke 0, Kerning 406, with Mom's Typewriter, a font which has come into fashion lately.
First I created a white layer (white font), and then duplicated it, but it of course didn't show up on the white lines so I duplicated it again and changed that font color to black. Of course, then the black didn't show up on the black part of the icon and so I selected the eraser tool, set it to Square Shape, Hardness 100, Size >80 (so as to get the whole line in), Opacity 100, and erased all of the top half of the black font layer.
That's it.
Note how the image looks completely different when put on a different color background, however. Just to get an idea of how it might look in a Boxer layout, for example:
If you have any questions, comments, or examples of where you did this yourself using this tutorial please feel free to share. Thanks!
- Andrea.