Tutorial 1: Jessica Alba
So here is my very first icon tutorial. I just got done making this icon and was fairly happy with the results and, since I still had the PSD file, I thought I'd make a tutorial out of it. I hope it's easy enough to follow!
(NOTE: Any borders are there to show the edges of the icon only)
This tutorial teaches you how to make:
1. First I cropped this image to a 100x100 base. I did my usually sharpening and working with the curves until it was a little stronger. (Since the original image was already grayscale, I didn't need to desaturate it).
2. The next step was to duplicate the base layer and set it to soft light. (Depending on how dark the oringal image is, you may need to change to opacity of this new layer to lessen the impact).
3. I then applied the gradient, and set it to soft light.
4. The colour didn't show through enough, so I duplicated the gradient layer and made sure this new layer was also set to soft light.
BEFORE:
>>> AFTER:
5. The icon looked a little boring, so I created a new blank layer and used a splatter brush to add a bit of detail to one side. I then set this layer to soft light.
6. That gave me this:
And, although I thought that was kind of cute, I wanted to make it a bit more interesting.
7. I merged all the layers into one, and resized the image to 85px x 85px.
8. I set the background colour to #F6F2EE, and then changed the canvas size back to 100px x 100px
9. I selected a small part of the image (in this case, Jess' face) and copied it into a new layer.
10. At this point, the new layer wasn't visible, as it was identical to the layer below, and therefore added nothing to the icon. So I rotated it until I was happy with the angle.
And voila! Iconage!
(NOTE: Any borders are there to show the edges of the icon only)
This tutorial teaches you how to make:
1. First I cropped this image to a 100x100 base. I did my usually sharpening and working with the curves until it was a little stronger. (Since the original image was already grayscale, I didn't need to desaturate it).
2. The next step was to duplicate the base layer and set it to soft light. (Depending on how dark the oringal image is, you may need to change to opacity of this new layer to lessen the impact).
3. I then applied the gradient, and set it to soft light.
4. The colour didn't show through enough, so I duplicated the gradient layer and made sure this new layer was also set to soft light.
BEFORE:
>>> AFTER:
5. The icon looked a little boring, so I created a new blank layer and used a splatter brush to add a bit of detail to one side. I then set this layer to soft light.
6. That gave me this:
And, although I thought that was kind of cute, I wanted to make it a bit more interesting.
7. I merged all the layers into one, and resized the image to 85px x 85px.
8. I set the background colour to #F6F2EE, and then changed the canvas size back to 100px x 100px
9. I selected a small part of the image (in this case, Jess' face) and copied it into a new layer.
10. At this point, the new layer wasn't visible, as it was identical to the layer below, and therefore added nothing to the icon. So I rotated it until I was happy with the angle.
And voila! Iconage!