Tutorial - Contrasty Icons [Axl & Stephanie] - PSP7

From this: to this: using psp7, though it should translate fairly simply.



First I started with this cap of axl and Stephanie (or Mayne and Elizabeth, if you want to be pedantic) from the November Rain video.

I cropped and resized it to 100x100 and sharpened it twice.

I then smoothed out the skin on Steph and axl’s faces with the soften tool

with my settings like this:

When softening I tend to make lots of little clicks rather than sweeping motions with the brush, it takes longer but makes the end result a little better.

You probably won’t see much difference in the two pictures, but I skipped this step first time around and the end result was a little pixely.

Then I copied (Ctrl + C) and pasted the image as a new image (Ctrl + V) and turned it black and white (Colours > Greyscale) and copied the image.

Go back to the original and paste the black and white as a new layer, set at Hard Light, 88% opacity.

Paste the same black and white image as another layer at Screen, 71% opacity.

Make a new raster layer, set it to Burn at 54% opacity and flood it with this lovely gradient from here


And you get:

So as a quick recap, your layer settings should look like this:


Add text if you want.
I did and got this , I made a tutorial about the text effect a few months ago, it can be found here - I also posted it to this community, but couldn't find it.


I probably shouldn't do this, but I'll quickly pimp my icon journal. There are more of these type of icons in gnr_icons, including this icon with and without text.

I hope that this tutorial was of help to you guys.

Should have added, this tutorial only works on warm-coloured icons. Anything dark tends to go a little odd.