Tutorial 04: Guild Wars character shots

shawn asked how I made these, sooo I figured I'd write up a quick guide. It's really not difficult, but it may require some fiddling and extreme zooming to get everything as close to perfect as you can. Rather than picking apart one I already made, I decided to just redo the one of my mesmer as I thought it was a little boring :D.

You need to have at least some understand of layers and various Photoshop tools, as well as a bunch of textures--if you don't have any textures, I zipped a bunch of my favorites for kamara ages ago. You can find textures all over LJ (texturize) as well as deviantArt (do a search for them).

I'll be making this:





First, pick your screenshot and crop it to the size you want. I'm making these 600px wide and 450px tall for no reason other than it being a nice size. Not too big, not too small.



Duplicate your layer and hide the original one. I always do this in case I fuck up somewhere and need to go back :P.

Time to mess with curves! The curves tool is ideal for brightening up your images and does a better job than just setting a new layer to screen. It can be found under Image --> Adjustment --> Curves, or you can just click the half-moon symbol at the bottom of your layers window and go from there.



Go back to your first layer and sharpen it a little if you think it needs it. Filter --> Sharpen --> Sharpen. If it's too much, go to Edit --> Fade Sharpen and adjust (or just hit Ctrl + Shift + F. Mmm keyboard shortcuts).

Duplicate your layer again and adjust the Brightness and Contrast. Don't overdo it, this is just to intensify the colors a bit.

If you're happy with the coloring and crispness of the image, merge all your layers (except the hidden original one) by hitting Ctrl + Shift + E.

At this point, you can do two things. You can either cut your character out of its background or you can just smudge the background around her. For these particular images, I choose the latter approach. Get the Smudge tool (R) and start smudging that bitch. You can do this in very broad strokes and it doesn't have to be perfect.



About halfway through here. Now, when you get close to the character, you need to switch tactics and just color around her. Pick a color from the image itself and start coloring.



Then get the Smudge tool again and go back at it. Again, this doesn't need to be perfect. It's okay if there's a difference in color (will make the end result better anyway) and you'll be throwing textures over it later regardless. This is what I ended up with:



I colored around her coat, but left the area around her head along because it's difficult and fiddly to get it right :P. For this reason, you might want to select an image where the head is against a peaceful background.

Now it's time for textures. This bit is mostly trial and error. I have hundreds of textures that I sift through trying to find one or two (or four or five, depending) that I like.

I picked this texture and set it to Linear Burn, 50% opacity.



Then this texture. Set it to Overlay, 35%.



Lastly, this texture, set to Multiply, 100%.



That's it for the coloring. Just add text (pick a text color from the image itself with the eyedropper tool) and play with fonts. For "Noel Avareth" I went with Jellyka Castle's Queen at a whopping 72pt, "mesmer" is An Unfortunate Event (24pt, 330 tracking) and "no one else will save you" is Little Lord Fontleroy, 18pt, italics, 300 tracking. (The standard font for all the images I did :P.)

The result:





Aaand that's it :D Hope this was at least a little bit helpful :P