Tutorial: Colors, Shapes, ImageReady for non-Animation Purposes
So I feel like I've abused the hospitality of you nice people long enough, and in an effort to give back to the community -- as well as to share some of my favorite icon-making tricks -- I'm offering up my Very First Tutorial.
I use Photoshop 7 and ImageReady, and I actually do a lot of the nuts and bolts of my icon-making in ImageReady itself, because there are features of the program I find easier to work with than Photoshop, and some things (I think!) are even better over there.
So, with that in mind, here's how I made this icon:
This week's challenge on
multi_pass offered up this base image:
So, I started the way I always do, in Photoshop, and I decided that Scully's rakish expression could benefit from an even more dramatic angle. I used the Rotate Image command to tip the base image 15 degrees counterclockwise, and I liked where that ended up.
I started wiggling the rectangular marquee tool around in its normal setting (not a fixed aspect ratio), because I like to trim bits off my image as I go along, rather than starting with a 100x100 square in case colorizing and fiddling with opacities makes a slightly different square more appealing. There was so much of this image that I liked that I cut myself a 160x100 image to begin with, figuring I'd play around with that and crop out a square after I'd sharpened and colorized it to my satisfaction.
I duplicated the layer five times, put the bottom three on Screen, the next on Luminosity and the top one on Soft Light. I sharpened every layer using Filter >> Sharpen >> Sharpen, and then sharpened the top two screen ones more using Filter >> Sharpen >> Unsharp Mask and then the trick I learned here recently -- I went to the Edit menu and pulled down to Fade Unsharp Mask right after I'd Unsharp Masked, set the mode to Luminosity and played with the faders until the bright sharpy edges went away.
I set the top two layers at about 80% opacity each, and then I put a brownish grey rectangle under the top Screen layer, which I then dialed down until enough of the color layer showed through. I ended up with this:
Which I loved. Merged visible, and then wiggled the rectangle tool around at a Fixed Aspect Ratio of 100x100 until I got this crop:
I duplicated that layer so I'd have a clean one at the bottom of my Layers palette in case I needed to go back to it. Then I used the eyedropper tool to select a brown from Scully's hair, and put a brown rectangle beneath my top image.
I clicked on the Eraser tool, set the opacity to 27% and picked a stripey brush (one of
oxoniensis's, I believe) I thought would match Scully's pinstripes. Using the brush as a 100x100 stamp, I clicked once on my top Scully layer, allowing the brown lines to show through where I'd subtly erased.
Now that I was done with brushes for the time being -- the majority of brushes I've loaded only work in Photoshop and not ImageReady -- I jumped over to ImageReady to play around with effects.
When I'm doing subtle shapes that I want to move around on the icon, I prefer ImageReady to Photoshop because I find that the Move tool -- the little arrow icon -- is more precise in ImageReady, especially for text. In Photoshop, elements tend to jump or click to defined areas on the grid; in ImageReady, it's easier to zoom in and subtly nudge objects and text around.
I knew I wanted to put some objects in that empty top right-hand corner, so I used the Lasso tool to select Scully out and put her on her own layer so that objects could be "tucked" behind her.
In keeping with the pinstriped motif, I used the rectangle tool to make a brown rectangle, which I outlined (Layers >> Layer Style >> Stroke) with a 1px black stroke border. Then I duplicated the rectangle layer seven times, setting each one to Overlay mode at 58% opacity, and used the Move tool to arrange them behind Scully.
When I was happy with their placement, it was time for text. I used the font Chanticleer Roman, one of my favorites, at 11pt with the anti-alias on Strong. I chose an off-white from Scully's shirt for the color.
I made two text layers, the first saying "all in a" and the second saying "day's work." Since I was in ImageReady, I had good precision control to zoom in and arrange the two text layers where I wanted them, on top of the seven rectangles in the right-hand corner. I nudged them until there was only about a 1px tall space between the two text layers, with the line from the "d" in "day's work" running up past the "all" on the left. As other people here have pointed out, having each line of text in a separate layer allows for much more control over the spacing between lines, which is also good if you want to overlap text. Again, I like being in ImageReady for this -- which may simply be a personal preference -- because ImageReady underlines the active text layer with a blue line and a nice square to hold on to, making it very easy to maneuver the text around the background.
Once I had the text lines where I wanted them, I duplicated each one. I made the color of the duplicated layers a dark brown, and put the dark brown text layers underneath the white layers, zooming in and using the Move tool to nudge them to just to the right and below the white layers, acting like drop shadows. I like doing drop shadows this way when I'm working with very small fonts, because I find them more precise than the blurry drop shadow the Layer Style >> Drop Shadow gives you. To further mimic a drop-shadow look, I rasterized the brown text layers and applied a 35% Gaussian Blur to them. Then I merged each white layer on top of its corresponding brown layer, in the event that I wanted to move them around later (I did, of course) and didn't want to lose the relationship between them.
Ta da! Now I had a fully brushed, texted icon, and it was time to adjust the colors and be on my merry way.
Here's a big secret that almost (almost!) always works. When you have an icon with fleshtones in it -- basically, anything with people in, no matter their skin color, no matter how you've colorized the icon -- you can tweak a very nice healthy skin glow with one simple trick.
Make a layer of a sort of matte brown color -- I like a variation on this:
And put it on top of your image in overlay. You can play with the opacity, but in this case (being a brownish sort of icon already), 100% worked just fine:
To finish up, I went into Image >> Adjust >> Variations and darkened the shadows and added some cyan to them, brightened the highlights and added some yellow, and then added one click of cyan to the image as a whole -- I like what cyan does to solid blacks like Scully's hat, and what it does to shadows of brownish skintone.
In the end, the icon looked like this:
I do hope this was helpful, and that I didn't just reiterate what everyone and her sister's said before. If you have any questions -- or tips on how I can make these tutorials more useful in the future -- or tips on stuff *I'm* not doing as well as I could -- speak up! And thanks for tuning in.
This icon, actually, is not for sharing, at least not until themulti_pass contest I'm in is over, at which point I may decide to post it to takenote_icons for sharing, or I may be greedy and keep it all to myself. *g* I promise to post a batch that are for sharing to takenote_icons this week!
I use Photoshop 7 and ImageReady, and I actually do a lot of the nuts and bolts of my icon-making in ImageReady itself, because there are features of the program I find easier to work with than Photoshop, and some things (I think!) are even better over there.
So, with that in mind, here's how I made this icon:
This week's challenge on
multi_pass offered up this base image:So, I started the way I always do, in Photoshop, and I decided that Scully's rakish expression could benefit from an even more dramatic angle. I used the Rotate Image command to tip the base image 15 degrees counterclockwise, and I liked where that ended up.
I started wiggling the rectangular marquee tool around in its normal setting (not a fixed aspect ratio), because I like to trim bits off my image as I go along, rather than starting with a 100x100 square in case colorizing and fiddling with opacities makes a slightly different square more appealing. There was so much of this image that I liked that I cut myself a 160x100 image to begin with, figuring I'd play around with that and crop out a square after I'd sharpened and colorized it to my satisfaction.
I duplicated the layer five times, put the bottom three on Screen, the next on Luminosity and the top one on Soft Light. I sharpened every layer using Filter >> Sharpen >> Sharpen, and then sharpened the top two screen ones more using Filter >> Sharpen >> Unsharp Mask and then the trick I learned here recently -- I went to the Edit menu and pulled down to Fade Unsharp Mask right after I'd Unsharp Masked, set the mode to Luminosity and played with the faders until the bright sharpy edges went away.
I set the top two layers at about 80% opacity each, and then I put a brownish grey rectangle under the top Screen layer, which I then dialed down until enough of the color layer showed through. I ended up with this:
Which I loved. Merged visible, and then wiggled the rectangle tool around at a Fixed Aspect Ratio of 100x100 until I got this crop:
I duplicated that layer so I'd have a clean one at the bottom of my Layers palette in case I needed to go back to it. Then I used the eyedropper tool to select a brown from Scully's hair, and put a brown rectangle beneath my top image.
I clicked on the Eraser tool, set the opacity to 27% and picked a stripey brush (one of
oxoniensis's, I believe) I thought would match Scully's pinstripes. Using the brush as a 100x100 stamp, I clicked once on my top Scully layer, allowing the brown lines to show through where I'd subtly erased. Now that I was done with brushes for the time being -- the majority of brushes I've loaded only work in Photoshop and not ImageReady -- I jumped over to ImageReady to play around with effects.
When I'm doing subtle shapes that I want to move around on the icon, I prefer ImageReady to Photoshop because I find that the Move tool -- the little arrow icon -- is more precise in ImageReady, especially for text. In Photoshop, elements tend to jump or click to defined areas on the grid; in ImageReady, it's easier to zoom in and subtly nudge objects and text around.
I knew I wanted to put some objects in that empty top right-hand corner, so I used the Lasso tool to select Scully out and put her on her own layer so that objects could be "tucked" behind her.
In keeping with the pinstriped motif, I used the rectangle tool to make a brown rectangle, which I outlined (Layers >> Layer Style >> Stroke) with a 1px black stroke border. Then I duplicated the rectangle layer seven times, setting each one to Overlay mode at 58% opacity, and used the Move tool to arrange them behind Scully.
When I was happy with their placement, it was time for text. I used the font Chanticleer Roman, one of my favorites, at 11pt with the anti-alias on Strong. I chose an off-white from Scully's shirt for the color.
I made two text layers, the first saying "all in a" and the second saying "day's work." Since I was in ImageReady, I had good precision control to zoom in and arrange the two text layers where I wanted them, on top of the seven rectangles in the right-hand corner. I nudged them until there was only about a 1px tall space between the two text layers, with the line from the "d" in "day's work" running up past the "all" on the left. As other people here have pointed out, having each line of text in a separate layer allows for much more control over the spacing between lines, which is also good if you want to overlap text. Again, I like being in ImageReady for this -- which may simply be a personal preference -- because ImageReady underlines the active text layer with a blue line and a nice square to hold on to, making it very easy to maneuver the text around the background.
Once I had the text lines where I wanted them, I duplicated each one. I made the color of the duplicated layers a dark brown, and put the dark brown text layers underneath the white layers, zooming in and using the Move tool to nudge them to just to the right and below the white layers, acting like drop shadows. I like doing drop shadows this way when I'm working with very small fonts, because I find them more precise than the blurry drop shadow the Layer Style >> Drop Shadow gives you. To further mimic a drop-shadow look, I rasterized the brown text layers and applied a 35% Gaussian Blur to them. Then I merged each white layer on top of its corresponding brown layer, in the event that I wanted to move them around later (I did, of course) and didn't want to lose the relationship between them.
Ta da! Now I had a fully brushed, texted icon, and it was time to adjust the colors and be on my merry way.
Here's a big secret that almost (almost!) always works. When you have an icon with fleshtones in it -- basically, anything with people in, no matter their skin color, no matter how you've colorized the icon -- you can tweak a very nice healthy skin glow with one simple trick.
Make a layer of a sort of matte brown color -- I like a variation on this:
And put it on top of your image in overlay. You can play with the opacity, but in this case (being a brownish sort of icon already), 100% worked just fine:
To finish up, I went into Image >> Adjust >> Variations and darkened the shadows and added some cyan to them, brightened the highlights and added some yellow, and then added one click of cyan to the image as a whole -- I like what cyan does to solid blacks like Scully's hat, and what it does to shadows of brownish skintone.
In the end, the icon looked like this:
I do hope this was helpful, and that I didn't just reiterate what everyone and her sister's said before. If you have any questions -- or tips on how I can make these tutorials more useful in the future -- or tips on stuff *I'm* not doing as well as I could -- speak up! And thanks for tuning in.
This icon, actually, is not for sharing, at least not until the
multi_pass contest I'm in is over, at which point I may decide to post it to takenote_icons for sharing, or I may be greedy and keep it all to myself. *g* I promise to post a batch that are for sharing to takenote_icons this week!