Tutorial 001 [repost]
Okay, so I can't promise that this tutorial will be very useful to anyone, as we all use different programs to make graphics and we all have different font packs installed, textures available to us for use, etc. But you might find it interesting to see how I do things. :) (And I would like to apologize in advance for being so wordy, I can't help it. By the time I'm done I just know this is going to end up becoming a giant wall of text. XD)
Today's icon tutorial is all about replacing background images!
Especially in the last two or three months, this is something I've been doing a lot. (And I used the exact same technique on all of them, so for the most part a tutorial of one of them will basically show you how they all came about, more or less.)
We're going to go from this to this:
>
First I guess a little information on what tools I have at my disposal. Growing up I always wanted a fancypants graphics tablet to do art, but I never got one and lost interest in drawing, so maybe that was for the best. I've always just worked with a mouse on my laptop (except when my mouse runs out of batteries and I use the touch pad on the laptop... but it doesn't often come to that.)
Just about all of the real work gets done in Photoshop... and I am still proudly using that bootleg copy of Photoshop 6 I got in high school that doesn't even have all of the standard features. Yes, the crappy icons I made in 2002 were made in the exact same program that I use today, which really just goes to show that it doesn't matter what you make your icons in, it's all about how you use the tools available to you. (And no, I don't have plans to buy an updated version or get a different program, I'm perfectly comfortable using what I have now and I'm still learning new tricks!)
Anyway, before I keep rambling on, let's actually get to the tutorial.
First! Pick your picture. I like working with HD caps whenever I can, but this icon was made for an icon challenge, so I had to work with what I was given.
Now, I recommend you resize the picture however you resize things. I never really have an idea about how I want the icon to look (beyond "close crop" or "some sort of repeating image" etc) until I'm already 75% finished, so I'm rather carefree about the beginning steps haha. To be honest, as far as resizing an image goes, I just pop the image into Photoshop and use the scroll button on my mouse to zoom in and out to eyeball it. When I see a size I like, then I resize it be way of:
Image > Image size...
For this one, my scroll bar stopped on 18.1% and I thought that looked good so in the Image Size option box, I set the Width to 18%. (Height is linked to auto-change proportionally.) This gets you:
Ta-da! Now to make the actual icon. I do a File > New... to get a nice blank 100x100 place to work, and then I drag the layer with the resized picture from the first psd file over to the new one. (Or you can copy and paste the layer, whatever.) Obviously the resized picture is bigger than 100x100 so parts of it can't be seen any more because they're cut off on the sides, but that's great. I use the Move tool (the arrow) to just drag the picture around until it looks good/it's where I want it. (...Yes, this is how I do all of my crops.) I had just done a background removal or two and I was on a roll, so I decided to do another. With that in mind I made sure the image was nice and centered with a little extra space on top.
(I left the grey visible here so you could see that the image is still 100x100.. I don't like the checkered "invisible" base layer that Photoshop has so my bottom layer is always solid white. The way I moved the cap around just made it visible, that's all.)
When you've gotten to this step, the next thing you always do is DUPLICATE THE LAYER!!! The reason I can't make any tutorials from my SPN icons is because back then I only worked on one layer which is problematic for many reasons. For one, once you've done something there's no way to remember what you did or how you did it. Two, if you make a mistake, there's no way to fix it!! And even if something's not a mistake at the time, if you get to the very end and wish you hadn't made the bright red color adjustments because they don't match the background you just put in, tough cookies because there's nothing you can do about it.
Anyway, on your new copy of your picture, it's time to get it nice and crisp. 99% of the time I just do Filter > Sharpen to get the whole layer evenly crisper.
I then look at hair, facial features, and clothing edges to judge if it looks oversharpened. I thought this one did, so I set the opacity of the layer to 76%. Because the layer below is just the blurry original, it makes it look a little softer. Why 76%? No reason- I just keep one hand on the opacity slider bar and my eye on the image and when it looks good to me I stop (you'll find that's basically my technique for everything). 76% just happened to be what I thought looked good this time around.
Even though they're referred to as replaced background icons (or whatever people actually call them) I never actually remove the background. If you try to erase parts of the original picture, it's going to look jagged in places no matter what you do (often hair is the worst because it's not as solid). So pick your background color, and make a solid layer of it right above the layer you were just working on. I knew I was going to be making the whole thing brighter later, so I picked a nice dark orange and airbrushed the new layer.
This part can be time consuming depending on the image, but this one was pretty quick. Set the opacity of the color layer to about 50%, pick a small-ish eraser set to paintbrush mode (or anything that'll give you a smooth edge), zoom in to something crazy like 900% and go to town!
You don't want to leave anything covered up, but you also don't want too much of the original background showing or it'll look like a funny shadow. You'll probably have to switch erasers several times to get to smaller areas... but the good part is if you mess up, it's real easy to just color in the areas where you erased too much! If you make a mistake, it always looks smoother if you color in more than you need to and then erase the excess, rather than just coloring in the areas.
When you're done, zoom out to 100% again and change the opacity to 100% and see how it looks! At this point, you almost always have to do a half dozen touchups or so before it really looks good. I basically just turn the visibility on and off several times to see where looks like it needs fixing and then zoom in again to take care of it.
Now it's time to make this icon brighter! You can do any of these steps in any combination, I just go with what I feel like will work best. If you don't like using curves, using levels and brightness/contrast can get about the same effect. If I'm going to use curves I just about always use levels too because curves can add too much grey tint sometimes. So as far as brightness goes, if I'm going to use curves I always use that first. And as far as coloring goes, always selective color before color balance. (But if an icon is getting particularly crazy, after the initial order I might do several additional adjustment layers in any order and in any combination.)
Anyway! First up is curves to make the whole thing generally brighter. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves... Again, ALWAYS WORK ON A NEW LAYER!!!
Looking better already! I only ever use curves for this purpose. Again, just click and drag it around until it looks good is my Photoshop motto, haha. (Obviously the red numbers are just in there for the sake of this diagram.) Depending on how bright I need the icon to get, the point will end up in either box 2, 3, or 6. Occasionally I'll make another point on the line if I'm desperately hoping for a miracle to happen by fine-tuning it. :P
I used curves so now it's time for levels to make the blacks more black and the bright colors stand out more. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels... I hope you haven't forgotten my motto already, because I'm not repeating it anymore since I've already said it at least three times. :P
Now, for anyone who has ever taken note of the coloring in my icons, it's all done with selective color. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color... This feature lets you change the individual levels of color in the icon, and it's the most fun part! With this icon, I only made 3 changes and they were all very small. Reds- decrease cyan (makes skin tones warmer), Yellows- increase yellow (makes those Starfleet uniforms really pop), Blacks- increase black (I wanted the black to stand out more without adjusting brightness/contrast). The specific numbers aren't important because of my motto, but if you're curious in order it was -40, +9, +3. You can pretty much ignore what's happening to the background color this entire time- it's easy to adjust the background or make a new one, but you can't get rid of your picture. :P)
Now the last adjustment to make is color balance! Layer > New Adjustment layer > Color Balance... My rule of color balance: always add more red. It makes things look warmer, and is almost always a good idea haha.
I'm sure you may have noticed, while the image itself is looking better and better, the background color is looking worse and worse. I had decided a little while back that I was going to change it, but it's best to finish making all the color adjustments first. I went back down to the orange color layer, duplicated it, and set the original to invisible so I could go back to using it in case I ruined the copy. With the copy selected I went to Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation... (I swear this is the last time I'm going to say it but) then I slid the bar back and forth until I found a color that looked good. I almost went with a reddish orange or a purple, but the blue was my favorite in the end.
You could call it quits here and have a perfectly fine icon, but I like to add a highlight or two before I'm done. On a new layer above the blue but below the color adjustment layers, I took the airbrush tool set to white (100px with the fuzzy edges) and just made a big white dot over the face. Then I erased the area directly over the face so the face is surrounded by white. (In Photoshop they have that "Magic Wand Tool" that auto-selects large areas that you click on. I went down to the blue layer, selected the empty erased area where the body is, then with it still selected went up to the white dot layer and just slid a big eraser over the whole thing. If I'm not on a deadline I'll go in with an eraser to smooth out some of the edges, but this one was done in a hurry so I just left it the way it was.
Normally I just lower the opacity of the white to make it look soft, but since the coloring is so bright a soft light wouldn't look as good. Ironically, I set the white layer to "soft light" because that made the highlight look bolder while still being subtle.
Again, you could stop here and it'd be great, but I decided to do one more layer. On a new layer right above the white dot layer, I took the airbrush tool with fuzzy edges set to black and colored around the sides a bit to give the background a bit more gradation. I'm sure there are textures you can download that do a fuzzy black border evenly around an icon, but I like doing it by hand usually. The key is just to do even brushstrokes.
Obviously I thought that looked way too dark, so I set that layer to "soft light" too.
Again, I wasn't satisfied with how dark it was, so I lowered the opacity of the layer a bit. ....And that's it! You're done!
...And you'll never ask for a tutorial again. XD I applaud you if you made it through all that text! (Although, all of the people that know me IRL are probably somewhat amused because I type exactly the way I talk, so this is basically exactly what I'd be saying to you if you were sitting next to me right now and I was walking you through this.)
Feel free to snag the finished icon if you want, as it hasn't been posted yet. Thanks for reading!
Today's icon tutorial is all about replacing background images!
Especially in the last two or three months, this is something I've been doing a lot. (And I used the exact same technique on all of them, so for the most part a tutorial of one of them will basically show you how they all came about, more or less.)
We're going to go from this to this:
>
First I guess a little information on what tools I have at my disposal. Growing up I always wanted a fancypants graphics tablet to do art, but I never got one and lost interest in drawing, so maybe that was for the best. I've always just worked with a mouse on my laptop (except when my mouse runs out of batteries and I use the touch pad on the laptop... but it doesn't often come to that.)
Just about all of the real work gets done in Photoshop... and I am still proudly using that bootleg copy of Photoshop 6 I got in high school that doesn't even have all of the standard features. Yes, the crappy icons I made in 2002 were made in the exact same program that I use today, which really just goes to show that it doesn't matter what you make your icons in, it's all about how you use the tools available to you. (And no, I don't have plans to buy an updated version or get a different program, I'm perfectly comfortable using what I have now and I'm still learning new tricks!)
Anyway, before I keep rambling on, let's actually get to the tutorial.
First! Pick your picture. I like working with HD caps whenever I can, but this icon was made for an icon challenge, so I had to work with what I was given.
Now, I recommend you resize the picture however you resize things. I never really have an idea about how I want the icon to look (beyond "close crop" or "some sort of repeating image" etc) until I'm already 75% finished, so I'm rather carefree about the beginning steps haha. To be honest, as far as resizing an image goes, I just pop the image into Photoshop and use the scroll button on my mouse to zoom in and out to eyeball it. When I see a size I like, then I resize it be way of:
Image > Image size...
For this one, my scroll bar stopped on 18.1% and I thought that looked good so in the Image Size option box, I set the Width to 18%. (Height is linked to auto-change proportionally.) This gets you:
Ta-da! Now to make the actual icon. I do a File > New... to get a nice blank 100x100 place to work, and then I drag the layer with the resized picture from the first psd file over to the new one. (Or you can copy and paste the layer, whatever.) Obviously the resized picture is bigger than 100x100 so parts of it can't be seen any more because they're cut off on the sides, but that's great. I use the Move tool (the arrow) to just drag the picture around until it looks good/it's where I want it. (...Yes, this is how I do all of my crops.) I had just done a background removal or two and I was on a roll, so I decided to do another. With that in mind I made sure the image was nice and centered with a little extra space on top.
(I left the grey visible here so you could see that the image is still 100x100.. I don't like the checkered "invisible" base layer that Photoshop has so my bottom layer is always solid white. The way I moved the cap around just made it visible, that's all.)
When you've gotten to this step, the next thing you always do is DUPLICATE THE LAYER!!! The reason I can't make any tutorials from my SPN icons is because back then I only worked on one layer which is problematic for many reasons. For one, once you've done something there's no way to remember what you did or how you did it. Two, if you make a mistake, there's no way to fix it!! And even if something's not a mistake at the time, if you get to the very end and wish you hadn't made the bright red color adjustments because they don't match the background you just put in, tough cookies because there's nothing you can do about it.
Anyway, on your new copy of your picture, it's time to get it nice and crisp. 99% of the time I just do Filter > Sharpen to get the whole layer evenly crisper.
I then look at hair, facial features, and clothing edges to judge if it looks oversharpened. I thought this one did, so I set the opacity of the layer to 76%. Because the layer below is just the blurry original, it makes it look a little softer. Why 76%? No reason- I just keep one hand on the opacity slider bar and my eye on the image and when it looks good to me I stop (you'll find that's basically my technique for everything). 76% just happened to be what I thought looked good this time around.
Even though they're referred to as replaced background icons (or whatever people actually call them) I never actually remove the background. If you try to erase parts of the original picture, it's going to look jagged in places no matter what you do (often hair is the worst because it's not as solid). So pick your background color, and make a solid layer of it right above the layer you were just working on. I knew I was going to be making the whole thing brighter later, so I picked a nice dark orange and airbrushed the new layer.
This part can be time consuming depending on the image, but this one was pretty quick. Set the opacity of the color layer to about 50%, pick a small-ish eraser set to paintbrush mode (or anything that'll give you a smooth edge), zoom in to something crazy like 900% and go to town!
You don't want to leave anything covered up, but you also don't want too much of the original background showing or it'll look like a funny shadow. You'll probably have to switch erasers several times to get to smaller areas... but the good part is if you mess up, it's real easy to just color in the areas where you erased too much! If you make a mistake, it always looks smoother if you color in more than you need to and then erase the excess, rather than just coloring in the areas.
When you're done, zoom out to 100% again and change the opacity to 100% and see how it looks! At this point, you almost always have to do a half dozen touchups or so before it really looks good. I basically just turn the visibility on and off several times to see where looks like it needs fixing and then zoom in again to take care of it.
Now it's time to make this icon brighter! You can do any of these steps in any combination, I just go with what I feel like will work best. If you don't like using curves, using levels and brightness/contrast can get about the same effect. If I'm going to use curves I just about always use levels too because curves can add too much grey tint sometimes. So as far as brightness goes, if I'm going to use curves I always use that first. And as far as coloring goes, always selective color before color balance. (But if an icon is getting particularly crazy, after the initial order I might do several additional adjustment layers in any order and in any combination.)
Anyway! First up is curves to make the whole thing generally brighter. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves... Again, ALWAYS WORK ON A NEW LAYER!!!
Looking better already! I only ever use curves for this purpose. Again, just click and drag it around until it looks good is my Photoshop motto, haha. (Obviously the red numbers are just in there for the sake of this diagram.) Depending on how bright I need the icon to get, the point will end up in either box 2, 3, or 6. Occasionally I'll make another point on the line if I'm desperately hoping for a miracle to happen by fine-tuning it. :P
I used curves so now it's time for levels to make the blacks more black and the bright colors stand out more. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels... I hope you haven't forgotten my motto already, because I'm not repeating it anymore since I've already said it at least three times. :P
Now, for anyone who has ever taken note of the coloring in my icons, it's all done with selective color. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color... This feature lets you change the individual levels of color in the icon, and it's the most fun part! With this icon, I only made 3 changes and they were all very small. Reds- decrease cyan (makes skin tones warmer), Yellows- increase yellow (makes those Starfleet uniforms really pop), Blacks- increase black (I wanted the black to stand out more without adjusting brightness/contrast). The specific numbers aren't important because of my motto, but if you're curious in order it was -40, +9, +3. You can pretty much ignore what's happening to the background color this entire time- it's easy to adjust the background or make a new one, but you can't get rid of your picture. :P)
Now the last adjustment to make is color balance! Layer > New Adjustment layer > Color Balance... My rule of color balance: always add more red. It makes things look warmer, and is almost always a good idea haha.
I'm sure you may have noticed, while the image itself is looking better and better, the background color is looking worse and worse. I had decided a little while back that I was going to change it, but it's best to finish making all the color adjustments first. I went back down to the orange color layer, duplicated it, and set the original to invisible so I could go back to using it in case I ruined the copy. With the copy selected I went to Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation... (I swear this is the last time I'm going to say it but) then I slid the bar back and forth until I found a color that looked good. I almost went with a reddish orange or a purple, but the blue was my favorite in the end.
You could call it quits here and have a perfectly fine icon, but I like to add a highlight or two before I'm done. On a new layer above the blue but below the color adjustment layers, I took the airbrush tool set to white (100px with the fuzzy edges) and just made a big white dot over the face. Then I erased the area directly over the face so the face is surrounded by white. (In Photoshop they have that "Magic Wand Tool" that auto-selects large areas that you click on. I went down to the blue layer, selected the empty erased area where the body is, then with it still selected went up to the white dot layer and just slid a big eraser over the whole thing. If I'm not on a deadline I'll go in with an eraser to smooth out some of the edges, but this one was done in a hurry so I just left it the way it was.
Normally I just lower the opacity of the white to make it look soft, but since the coloring is so bright a soft light wouldn't look as good. Ironically, I set the white layer to "soft light" because that made the highlight look bolder while still being subtle.
Again, you could stop here and it'd be great, but I decided to do one more layer. On a new layer right above the white dot layer, I took the airbrush tool with fuzzy edges set to black and colored around the sides a bit to give the background a bit more gradation. I'm sure there are textures you can download that do a fuzzy black border evenly around an icon, but I like doing it by hand usually. The key is just to do even brushstrokes.
Obviously I thought that looked way too dark, so I set that layer to "soft light" too.
Again, I wasn't satisfied with how dark it was, so I lowered the opacity of the layer a bit. ....And that's it! You're done!
...And you'll never ask for a tutorial again. XD I applaud you if you made it through all that text! (Although, all of the people that know me IRL are probably somewhat amused because I type exactly the way I talk, so this is basically exactly what I'd be saying to you if you were sitting next to me right now and I was walking you through this.)
Feel free to snag the finished icon if you want, as it hasn't been posted yet. Thanks for reading!