2013 - guide: tips & tricks.
Requested by: a whole bunch of fabulous people.
Preface.
The Tips & Tricks part of this was originally requested by john_scorpy, however it has just about every other request thrown into it as well. Some of them are here because I felt there wasn't enough to warrant their own individual guide, others because I felt anything I had to say would be rehashing something I've said before. This resulted in a constant procrastination and putting off of writing just about anything.
Basically this has become a mash-up of answers to all sorts of questions. There is no method to this madness, and if you are interested in me explaining on any of the (sometimes brief) points of discussion, I will be more than happy to; but I did try my best to cover the major points of importance of things people requested from me.
The graphics program I use is Photoshop CS5, so something may not be translatable. I apologise for that, and if you do work with a different graphics program, let me know and I will hunt to see if I can find a tutorial on a similar aspect in your program.
Finally, I am so apologetic that this is as long as image heavy as it is. It was never my intention to overwhelm everyone with extreme amounts of information, and then I did, and the information in turn needed lots of examples, and suddenly this was a giant mess of everything. In most cases the first example icon here is just a reference for what the icon looked like prior to any adjustments that are then explained.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
01. Cropping
02. Variations & Auto Correct
03. Color Balance
04. Curves
05. Hue/Saturation & Photo Filters
06. Brushes
07. Textures
08. Layer Modes
09. Font Choices
10. Font Styles
01. The icon is rarely pure and never simple.
None of my icons start out icon-sized. Not all of my icons start out in a box size either. Often I will go through phases where I work on whole screencaps resized anywhere between 533px by 300px to 400px by 225px, while other times I’ll find that the 200x200 canvas I’m working with loses quality when it’s resized, so I’ll crop it to make the canvas slightly smaller and resize from there. While icons (on live journal at least) are 100x100 pixels or less, but that doesn't mean they need to begin their life in that size. The added bonus of working with a screencap in a resized canvas means if you’re unsure of how the cap could be cropped, but still want to play around with it, you can see where that goes - and also see if your lighting/texture work highlight a cropping option while your icon is in development.
02. Variation is the spice of life.
Do you have a dream for an icon, but ideal cap doesn’t have the right colour? Is your cap a washed out mess? Look no further than your auto correct or variations option!
But I digress, variations and auto-correct are some of my favourite options of things to do at the beginning of an icon. The Auto option on Curves/Levels can add a little contrast to an under-contrasted cap, or change the cap completely. Either way, it’s something that might help your icon begin to take shape, and an option that you can always add or subtract in a variety of ways throughout the process of the icon.
Alternatively, variations offer a way to bring subtle colour into your icon at any stage - and I tend to use it in the initial stages when I want to emphasise a specific colour that may not necessarily be in the icon already. The best thing about variations is you can go with any number of colour combinations, as well as lighten and darken your icon.
While I never use it (and writing this makes me think I should), variations gives you the option of playing with the midtones, shadows, highlights and saturation within an icon. However the reason I use midtones is because it has a tendency to add intense colour quite quickly. The other option included is a Fine - Course slider, which again allows the intensity of the colour to be intensified or lowered.
03. Step from the midtones into the shadows or highlights.
As someone who approached graphic making from a less than exploratory approach, what I've learned to love about color balance recently is the use of highlights and shadows to add depth and light into an icon, without discounting the magic of the mid tones option. Just as I enjoy utilising Hue/Saturation to its full potential on lighter caps, I've found caps with darker areas or black negative space benefit wonderfully from using all three elements of color balance.
What I personally love about colour balance is that it can be used anywhere throughout the process of the icon and still be effective. It helps during the initial stages if there is a dominant colour that you want to remove, or as the icon winds down, and you just want to pull back, deepen or emphasise a specific colour.
04. Auto Mask your cares away.
I've used curves in the past to brighten icons and add colour into icons, but lately I've been experimenting with the way the automatic mask options of Highlights, Midtones & Shadows can manipulate the curves layer I've added, in terms of adding a more unique style of colouring and even a slightly more textured feel to the icon. These options can be found in the Color Range area of the masking tool.
The settings are generally random, I tend to play with the blues and greens rather than the yellows and magenta's, however in the end it really is just a combination of guess work, and trial and error until something happens to work.
Sometimes the effects can be minimal, sometimes they can be extreme, but all the time they are worthwhile exploring to see if the mask gives me other colouring options, or point me in the direction of a style I want to emphasise in the icon.
05. We are gathered here today to join Hue/Saturation & Photo Filters in holy matrimony.
partitioning asked about how I achieve muted yet vibrant colouring, and this section is particularly relevant to two of the requests by anassa_anemou. As a quick prelude, I've addressed both these tools before, and in greater detail in this guide, which I think is worth reading if you want to learn more about how the tools work.
Often while iconing I find the colouring the vibrance tool can add is sometimes a little too intense, so if I’m looking for a softer vibrance I’ll use Hue/Saturation, Photo Filter or a combination of the two. It’s more temperamental than other colouring tools, and can easily move from oh nice to OH GOD, but as an added bonus it allows you to play with individual colour tones and hues as well as the overall colouring of the icon, in terms of saturation, hue and lightness.
Photo Filter is such a brilliant tool. It has a variety of tint options including warming & cooling filters, as well as individual colour filters that tint the overall image. This can add colour into the icon without adding too much contrast, which is what really helps when looking for the more muted colouring style. There is the option of lowering or upping the intensity of the tint, and also changing the darkness or lightness of the colour you’re working with.
I tend to enjoy the effect Hue/Saturation has on caps that have a lot of light in them already, and no real degree of black or dark negative space, as that allows me to use the lightness option to its full potential, but that is also a personal preference, and if you’d like to take contrast out of darker areas in your icon, using this is definitely a way to achieve that.
And together they are a dream team that pack a one, two punch of awesome. This is absolutely the combo that I use to an extremely ridiculously point when I want my icon to have a much softer vibrancy.
06. Sometimes a texture isn't really a texture.
kayable, petite_tomate & starkwars asked about the texture usage in this post, and while I would like to claim extreme texture creativity, the truth behind this post is that most of the visible textures are in fact brushes. There was a lot of exploration of this site (generally in the abstract and possibly shapes sections), as well as this site (again in the abstract section) and the end result was really creative backgrounds for the screencaps to be cut out against.
I played with a variety of brushes before figuring out what worked - and then I played with size, shape and rotation of those brushes to fit them in to the background as best as possible. Generally I had the screencap picked out before I began working with the background and brush colour, so the colours were taken from the cap and generally brightened up a little. As with all things graphic related, it was 99% exploration and 1% understanding, and from there it just became a thing, and something I would 100% recommend exploring in your own time.
6.1. Still, sometimes it’s just a texture...
… or a combination of both. The icons weren't completely without textures. Firstly I used a lot of light textures, mainly because I didn't want the icons to feel flat, which is something I worry my monochromatic icons can feel. Light textures allowed me to add different shades of colour, or contrasting colour into the icons. If you are interested in expanding your light texture collection, I recommend checking out blue_emotion, ofthesea, mm3butterfly, pamkips & scoobyatemysnax.
The second texture element for the post was using larger textures that had a theme of either circles or moons/planets that ran with the theme of the Sailor Senshi’s ruling planets or powers. I honestly can’t remember where all the texture examples came from (which is the worst thing ever when trying to write tutorials and half your icons use 10+ textures), but the textures discussion in this guide provides several tumblr texture sharing sites, as well as my favourite tumblr texture makers, so I’d recommend that as a starting point because odds are high that the textures I used came from there.
07. A texture is only as small as your imagination.
I view textures almost in a blank canvas sort of way. I rotate them, resize them, blur them, crop them, invert them, change their colours completely - all because I’ll like something about the texture, but perhaps that something needs to be enhanced in a way that the original texture doesn't emphasise. Manipulating textures can have some crazy extreme results, but it can also mean icons can look completely different without the stress of having to continuously texture hunt for a huge variety of textures. That doesn't mean I don't give the original texture maker credit, because that is always top priority. Credit where credit is due, even if the original texture is unrecognisable, it's still theirs originally.
7.1. Build me up, texture use, don't break my heart.
In the same way I manipulate textures, more often than not I’ll add a wide range of textures to icons to slowly add something. I tend to be a more is less kind of texture worker, in that I use more textures on lower opacity to sometimes very minutely change the colour, texture or style of the icon.
(click images to view textures used and I promise, something does change through all of these images, even if it doesn't seem like it does!)
(click images to view textures)
Other times it’s a less is more, in that there are fewer textures with higher opacity that are added specifically to emphasise elements in icons.
And very occasionally, the textures will dictate the shape the icon takes completely, from the very initial stages of composition and cropping, and then a continued role throughout the composition of the icon.
tl:dr explore your textures without fearing you are adding too many, or using too few, be as selective or as liberal as you want with your texture opacity and layer modes as well.
08. Be the layer mode change you want to see.
Screen & soft light are awesome - but there are heaps of layer modes, and they are all fantastic in their own individual way. Often I explore layer modes when I have no clear direction for an icon to take, or the exploration of layer modes changes the direction of the icon completely. Some of my favourite other layer modes are hard light & exclusion, and lately I've found myself enjoying saturation and linear dodge (add).
8.1. If all else fails, look to where you came from.
Another way to change things up in your icon is by using fill layers and gradients. They can both add more colours to the icon, but also add lighting and contrast if that’s something you’d like to change up as well. It can be a simpler solution than hunting to find a texture that you may never find, and can actually change the shape of an icon completely.
09. The next font is only as good as your last.
applepips16 asked about my font usage, which surprised me to no end as font and I have a love/hate relationship at best - sometimes we’re great friends, other times I’m Harry and text is Voldemort. I can be inspired to add text in a number of ways. Sometimes the screencap/icon itself just looks like it needs fun times text (01 & 02), other times I’m inspired by quotes about a character I feel strongly about (01 & 02), or I’ll be completely inspired by a challenge, and lift text from the strangest places (ads and movies) like everything in this inspired20in20 set. The one thing I will honestly say is that I never set out to intentionally add text to an icon - it’s something that happens
Throughout the year I've sporadically explored the new fonts section at dafont.com, and have snagged myself approximately 150 new fonts this year, though I definitely have a preferred set of fonts & styles that I tend of abuse more often than not.
More often than not, I’ll pair two types of fonts in icons - solid, stocky fonts (such a Futura, Governor & Rockwell) for the main text, and the more decorative fonts (Ballpark, Old English Text, Satisfaction) to highlight single words or phrases of importance. That’s my personal preference though, and there is absolutely no hard and fast rule about how to pair fonts. Generally it’s a trial and error process until you happen upon two (or more) fonts that suit the individual icon you’re working on.
10. Funking fonts up.
Colour: Generally I take the colour of the font from the icon itself, and then either pick a lighter or darker shade from said colour to help it stand out, and sometimes I’ll do both, and create a shadow of darker text behind the lighter text. The colour choice can vary from similar colouring (in monotone type icons) to composite colours in icons that have more than one dominant colour.
Size & Spacing: The Character Panel & I are well acquainted when it comes to sizing and spacing of text. Beyond playing with the actual size tool, I tend to use Tracking, which modifies the spacing between all characters, to space out words, as well as the Vertical and Horizontal Scale to manipulate the shape of characters and make them taller, shorter or wider than the original font. I also use the All Caps and Small Caps options in the Additional Type Options section. I have a tendency to like my text aligned, so that’s where the Character Panel comes in particularly handy to manipulate the alignment of text - whether it’s to fit text into areas under or near other text, or to align shorter words with longer words.
Rotation: Your basic use of the transform tool to manipulate the rotation of the text. Flip it horizontally, vertically or upside down. Use Ctrl + T to angle your text on a slope that isn't a complete rotation. I tend to rotate my text to align it with some aspect of the icon I've made: in the second example I've rotated the bottom text completely to create an element of reflection for the text and in the third example I've rotated it towards Ten (Doctor Who), who is the focal point of the icon. I apparently have a tendency to rotate text slightly more towards the top right corner than anything else, but I suggest exploring the method in your own way to find out what words for you.
Warping: Sometimes basic rotation isn't cutting it for me; I’ll want to follow a curved line in the icon, or give my text a little bit of attitude. Warping allows you to manipulate the text as a whole (so consider working with individual words or even letters if you want to use it for emphasis), as well as giving you an option for horizontal and vertical distortion, which can be wonderful if you are looking to insert words together and find the best fit for them. My best advice here is to explore. You’ll find settings that suit some text types but not others, and then you’ll find out how extreme (or not) you’ll want the warping of your text to be.
Decorative Elements: Another thing I look to in order to add a little spice to the text in my icon is decorative elements. This can range using shapes in the Custom Shapes tool (examples 1, 3 & 6), using textures as a background for you text (examples 3 & 4), or finding images to be used as text (example 2). Think of this as composition through text, rather than simple addition of text to enhance composition (if there is even a difference between the two).
Animated Text: Finally, animated text. It's fun but tedious (at least the way I do it) and it tends to result in me making multiple alternate icons with various degrees of text on them, and crying in a corner over and over if I decide to change the font type when I'm almost at the finish line. Animated text is fantastic when you've got a quote or a phrase that is long (and generally amusing), but doesn't seem to want to work on a single image. I often use it when slightly insane or weird ideas take hold (example 4 & 6 below) and somehow, the screencaps and textures and text just come together. If you use an earlier version of Photoshop (like CS) - Image Ready is what you want to use to explore Animated text, while later versions (like PS5) have an animation tool embedded in the program.
Prologue
And so our journey ends here. I sincerely hope that there are answers in there somewhere (if you in fact asked questions) and that something written was found useful if not. I also apologise for anything that doesn't happen to make sense, or any spelling mistakes which are more than likely to be here. If you have any more questions please feel free to ask here or at my original ask the maker comment.