Full Icon Tutorial for PS7
This is a bit long and it has lots of pictures, but I thought I'd finally play my part around here and give you this tutorial because I accidentally managed to make an effect that I thought was pretty, well, cool. It's up to you to decide if it really is that.
Here's the icon we're gonna be making.
This is the picture I started working with. It's from gettyimages.com.
First I cropped it. Now even though the water spray makes a lot of the picture, I still mostly left it out of my crop because I wanted to concentrate on the facial expression and the pose of the hands and had I left the crop too big, they wouldn't have been clear enough. As you can see, even now the girl's a bit blurry. We'll get to that later.
Then I duplicated the cropped layer three times.
Desaturated the top three.
Set the one on the top to Soft Light 80%
Set the layer second from top to Overlay 80%
Third from top to Multiply 45% and add sharpen.
This is what you should have now.
And this is how the pic looks like now.
I liked the contrast in this one (because, hey, I'm a contrast whore) but obviously it was way too dark. So next I did this:
I upgraded the background layer into a normal layer by doubleclicking on it, left its opacity to 100%, then went to Image --> Adjustments --> Levels. Now this was were the accident happened and I noticed that if I pull the Brightness and Midtones almost all the way to the left corner (see what looks good) I get the girl's torso to desaturate. Like this. I can't remember the exact values I used but I think the Input Levels were around 0;1,58;80.
Now all we have to do is get the girl's features clear. First I added sharpen to Layers 1, 2, and 3. Then I selected Layer 1 and went to Image --> Adjustments --> selective Color. I played around mostly with Whites, Neutrals and Blacks, then added until this is what I got.
This was good enough for me at this point so I flattened the image (you might want to save it as .psd right about now, just in case). The layer with the flattened image is now called Background.
I created a new layer (Layer 1) which I filled with dark red #5B0707, and set that layer to overlay 40%. The colour was too strong on the girl so I applied a Layer Mask and erased the areas on the girl with the brush opacity set to 40%.
I use layer masks a lot instead of eraser because with a layer mask I can correct my mistakes if I have accidentally erased something that I didn't want erased.
I created another new layer (Layer 2) on top of the red one. On that layer I applied a dark blue colour (#07325B) with a texture brush, set the layer to Difference 30%. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference but I thought there was something more there and I'm just anal that way. This is the brush I used, by
teh_indy. I applied it a few times because it was so faint.
And this is what I got.
Now, We get to fixing the girl's face, which is still too unclear. So went to the background layer, got out Polygonal Lasso Tool and selected her face and her upper hand. I applied Feather, value 10, to that selection (Ctrl+Alt+D) and copied the selection into a new layer. I set that new layer (Layer 5) to Multiply 50% and went to Levels again, set the Input Levels to 110;1,00;255. Layer 5 should be under the coloured layers. I duplicated Layer 5 and set that layer (Layer 5 copy) to Darken 74%.
Now I was satisfied with the darkness of the girl. It was time for a border. I created yet another new layer on top of all the others, Layer 4 to which I was going to apply the border with this brush by, again,teh_indy, the layer set to Hard Light and flipped vertically (Edit --> Transform --> Flip Vertical).
Added a blue layer (#0E1A44; Layer 6) on top of it all, and this is what you should have now.
I added Motion Blur (value 1, -36 degrees) on Layer copy 5. Then I added text. I used a tan color (#D0BFA2) under the border and blue exclusion layers. I added "Life's full of" with Arial Black, size 4, the space between letters plus 200. I usually add all the different lines of text into their own layers because it's easier to work with them then. So, this was the point where I created a new font layer. I accidentally, while looking for the right font, added the "surprises" with a grunch font (it says '3 theHard way RMX' on the font, but if I remember correctly, it wasn't called like that when I downloaded it from here), size 12, and then set it to overlay. The text became too faint for me to be able to read it but I thought the effect looked cool, so I left it in (it's the orange thingy behind the text). Then I added the 'surprises' text with the same tan color as the "life" line, with a font called Diesel (downloaded from the same place as the previous one), size 12, space between letters +50. Added stroke (set to multiply 60%) to the text, layer opacity of 'Surprises' to 80%.
Your layer palette should look like this now.
I flattened the image, went to Selective Color, added +15 Black to the Blacks, and this is the result.
I hope this was useful for someone.
Here's the icon we're gonna be making.
This is the picture I started working with. It's from gettyimages.com.
First I cropped it. Now even though the water spray makes a lot of the picture, I still mostly left it out of my crop because I wanted to concentrate on the facial expression and the pose of the hands and had I left the crop too big, they wouldn't have been clear enough. As you can see, even now the girl's a bit blurry. We'll get to that later.
Then I duplicated the cropped layer three times.
Desaturated the top three.
Set the one on the top to Soft Light 80%
Set the layer second from top to Overlay 80%
Third from top to Multiply 45% and add sharpen.
This is what you should have now.
And this is how the pic looks like now.
I liked the contrast in this one (because, hey, I'm a contrast whore) but obviously it was way too dark. So next I did this:
I upgraded the background layer into a normal layer by doubleclicking on it, left its opacity to 100%, then went to Image --> Adjustments --> Levels. Now this was were the accident happened and I noticed that if I pull the Brightness and Midtones almost all the way to the left corner (see what looks good) I get the girl's torso to desaturate. Like this. I can't remember the exact values I used but I think the Input Levels were around 0;1,58;80.
Now all we have to do is get the girl's features clear. First I added sharpen to Layers 1, 2, and 3. Then I selected Layer 1 and went to Image --> Adjustments --> selective Color. I played around mostly with Whites, Neutrals and Blacks, then added until this is what I got.
This was good enough for me at this point so I flattened the image (you might want to save it as .psd right about now, just in case). The layer with the flattened image is now called Background.
I created a new layer (Layer 1) which I filled with dark red #5B0707, and set that layer to overlay 40%. The colour was too strong on the girl so I applied a Layer Mask and erased the areas on the girl with the brush opacity set to 40%.
I use layer masks a lot instead of eraser because with a layer mask I can correct my mistakes if I have accidentally erased something that I didn't want erased.
I created another new layer (Layer 2) on top of the red one. On that layer I applied a dark blue colour (#07325B) with a texture brush, set the layer to Difference 30%. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference but I thought there was something more there and I'm just anal that way. This is the brush I used, by
teh_indy. I applied it a few times because it was so faint.And this is what I got.
Now, We get to fixing the girl's face, which is still too unclear. So went to the background layer, got out Polygonal Lasso Tool and selected her face and her upper hand. I applied Feather, value 10, to that selection (Ctrl+Alt+D) and copied the selection into a new layer. I set that new layer (Layer 5) to Multiply 50% and went to Levels again, set the Input Levels to 110;1,00;255. Layer 5 should be under the coloured layers. I duplicated Layer 5 and set that layer (Layer 5 copy) to Darken 74%.
Now I was satisfied with the darkness of the girl. It was time for a border. I created yet another new layer on top of all the others, Layer 4 to which I was going to apply the border with this brush by, again,
teh_indy, the layer set to Hard Light and flipped vertically (Edit --> Transform --> Flip Vertical).Added a blue layer (#0E1A44; Layer 6) on top of it all, and this is what you should have now.
I added Motion Blur (value 1, -36 degrees) on Layer copy 5. Then I added text. I used a tan color (#D0BFA2) under the border and blue exclusion layers. I added "Life's full of" with Arial Black, size 4, the space between letters plus 200. I usually add all the different lines of text into their own layers because it's easier to work with them then. So, this was the point where I created a new font layer. I accidentally, while looking for the right font, added the "surprises" with a grunch font (it says '3 theHard way RMX' on the font, but if I remember correctly, it wasn't called like that when I downloaded it from here), size 12, and then set it to overlay. The text became too faint for me to be able to read it but I thought the effect looked cool, so I left it in (it's the orange thingy behind the text). Then I added the 'surprises' text with the same tan color as the "life" line, with a font called Diesel (downloaded from the same place as the previous one), size 12, space between letters +50. Added stroke (set to multiply 60%) to the text, layer opacity of 'Surprises' to 80%.
Your layer palette should look like this now.
I flattened the image, went to Selective Color, added +15 Black to the Blacks, and this is the result.
I hope this was useful for someone.