Made in Photoshop 7! (NO curves or selective color) If you have any…: icon_tutorial

Made in Photoshop 7! (NO curves or selective color)

If you have any comments, I'd appreciate it if you left them HERE at my journal!

First of all, just let me say...don't follow this tutorial exactly! Always fiddle with your settings, change things, make them work for your icon and your style. This is just a tutorial to show you what you can do when you play around and experiment!

STEP 1.

Sharpen your image, then go to Edit > Fade Sharpen to lower the amount to your liking. Always be careful when sharpening! Oversharpening can really ruin an icon.

STEP 2.

This all depends on your image. If yours is like mine, you'll want to SLIGHTLY up the saturation (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation).

STEP 3.

Also depends on your image. For mine, I very slightly raised the contrast (Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast).

STEP 4.

Duplicate your topmost layer and set it to screen. For my particular image I set it at 60%, but mess with the opacity until it looks right to you :)

STEP 5.

Create a new layer. Press shift + ctrl + alt + E. Desaturate this new layer (shift + ctrl + u) and set it to soft light. I left mine at 100%, but again, change it to fit yours.

STEP 6.

Create a new layer and fill with #00206D. Set it to exclusion, 35%.

STEP 7.

The interesting thing is, I used to have a curves layer here. In writing this tutorial, I realized how much it sucks to go to a tut and have to try to input exact curves settings. Couldn't there be an easier way? So I experimented for a while and finally got it almost exactly the same!
Create a new layer and fill with #BB8A9F. Set to soft light, 50%! It's slightly darker than it was with curves (a teeny bit) but it's not really noticeable :)

STEP 8.

Create a new layer and fill with #6955FD. The hue itself doesn't matter as long as it's this same brightness and saturation. Set it to saturation, 40%.

You can stop here if you want, it's up to you really :)

STEP 9.