Tutorial- making a good icon from a bad, bad cap.
Using PS7, most likely easily transferable. Beginner friendly- I'll be explaining EVERYTHING in great detail for you. Main focus- taking a horrible, horrible quality screencap and making it into a quality icon. My second tutorial, tell me if I mess anything up.
Today, we'll be going from
to 
Alright, I'm starting with this cap:
Pretty bad, right? Well, that can be worked around. Bear with me.
Crop it to whatever size you want it. I chose this:
Sharpen it once. You'll get something like this:
I know, it looks really horrible and busy and such. We'll fix it.
Duplicate it once, set that layer to screen. Duplicate the base layer, drag it to the top, set it to soft light, then desaturate the soft light layer. You'll end up with something similar to this:
Flatten all the layers so you have one base again. Now, duplicate that and desaturate the duplicated base. A little finesse work here: we want our purtiful little Shia to stick out from the horribly busy background. So, on the desaturated layer, erase everything over Shia so only the background is desaturated. You'll end up with this:
Now, we don't want his pants blending into the background like that. They're too dark. You can fix this with a simple and very useful technique. Create a new fill layer and fill it with a bright blue color- for this icon, I chose 000087. Set the layer to color. You'll end up with this:
More finesse now. Erase all the color layer other than the part over his jeans, so now his jeans are pretty, blue, and help him stand out. Zoom in with the eraser if you have to. You should end up with this:
It looks to me like his hair is still a little dark. So, follow the same process as with the jeans: add a new fill layer using a bright brown color (I used 2D0F00). Set the fill layer to color, erase all but the parts over his hair. You'll get this:
Wonderful. Now that the picture actually looks like an icon, it's time for text.
I used Times New Roman at size 10.
Hahaha, you can't see it, can you? Easily fixed. Add a stroke to the text layer, size 3, black in color. Voila, you can see the text.
And that's all! Please, don't copy the icon exactly, don't want clones running around. Hope this tutorial taught you that a bad screencap does not necessarily make a bad or undoable icon. Comments and suggestions appreciated!
Today, we'll be going from
to Alright, I'm starting with this cap:
Pretty bad, right? Well, that can be worked around. Bear with me.
Crop it to whatever size you want it. I chose this:
Sharpen it once. You'll get something like this:
I know, it looks really horrible and busy and such. We'll fix it.
Duplicate it once, set that layer to screen. Duplicate the base layer, drag it to the top, set it to soft light, then desaturate the soft light layer. You'll end up with something similar to this:
Flatten all the layers so you have one base again. Now, duplicate that and desaturate the duplicated base. A little finesse work here: we want our purtiful little Shia to stick out from the horribly busy background. So, on the desaturated layer, erase everything over Shia so only the background is desaturated. You'll end up with this:
Now, we don't want his pants blending into the background like that. They're too dark. You can fix this with a simple and very useful technique. Create a new fill layer and fill it with a bright blue color- for this icon, I chose 000087. Set the layer to color. You'll end up with this:
More finesse now. Erase all the color layer other than the part over his jeans, so now his jeans are pretty, blue, and help him stand out. Zoom in with the eraser if you have to. You should end up with this:
It looks to me like his hair is still a little dark. So, follow the same process as with the jeans: add a new fill layer using a bright brown color (I used 2D0F00). Set the fill layer to color, erase all but the parts over his hair. You'll get this:
Wonderful. Now that the picture actually looks like an icon, it's time for text.
I used Times New Roman at size 10.
Hahaha, you can't see it, can you? Easily fixed. Add a stroke to the text layer, size 3, black in color. Voila, you can see the text.
And that's all! Please, don't copy the icon exactly, don't want clones running around. Hope this tutorial taught you that a bad screencap does not necessarily make a bad or undoable icon. Comments and suggestions appreciated!