tutorial!
I promised icon tutorials a while back for the free program Paint.Net that I've used for years, so here's the first one! :) I'm gonna show you guys how to turn this:
to this ----->
or just this
Whichever one you like better. :)
It's the same way I did the icon I'm using for this post
and this one:
First of all, you can download Paint.Net HERE. It's a redirect page because there's an actual paint company with a similar website, so click on the getpaint.net link to find download links. At the very top on the right hand will be the link you click to actually download the program, above all the flags. DON'T click the big 'DOWNLOAD' images in the middle, as those are ads. Got it? Good.
You'll need this texture for this icon:
HOKAY. We start with this pretty screen cap, which is from Rite of Passage, or episode 19 of season 5, Criminal Minds of course:
I just pulled this straight from the DVD, so feel free to use it for whatever. :)
Save it, and then open it in Paint.Net. It will look something like this:
You'll see on the left you have your basic tools like rectangle select, move pixels, lasso select, etc. Up at the top you have your tool bars. The ones we'll be using are 'Adjustments' and 'Layers.'
So, the first thing we need to do is bring Hotch and Reid down and make the sky bigger. To do that, simply click on the 'move selected pixels' tool on the left (it's the top row on the right). Click anywhere on the picture and it will select the entire thing. Then left click and drag the whole thing down. I went to about the bottom of the V of Reid's sweater vest. It'll look like this:
The white space above this is still part of the pic at this point. Then we need to cut out Prentiss and Morgan, sorry guys. Just take the rectangle select once again and put a big rectangle around Hotch and Reid. Like this:
Then up at the top, in between the tool with the red x and the clipboard is a command called crop to selection. I have it highlighted up at the top of this picture. Click on that, and it will crop the picture to what's inside the rectangle box. Then your cap will look like this:
After you've done that, use the 'rectangle select' tool and box out the top most piece of the sky, making sure not to include that tiny cloud on the right. Select it, and drag it up, filling in the blank space we just made. It should look like so:
Then we get to start making it look pretty! Yay! The first thing I always do is bring up the curves, which will make the cap look brighter and make it a bit more colorful. To do that, go up to the top of the screen to those tool bar things I mentioned earlier, and click on the one called Adjustments. It'll drop down some options, and we want 'Curves.'
There it is! It will bring up the curves box which looks like this:
Sorry, I must have forgotten to resize this particular screencap. Oh well, it works. What you need to do with Curves is make sure it's on 'RGB' and not Luminosity. It will always say Luminosity where it currently says RGB on my cap there when you first open Curves. So just click on the arrow next to Luminosity and click on RGB instead, which stands for Red, Green, Blue. Then just bring up the curves to about where I have. And we're done with the Curves, for now anyway.
The next thing we're going to do is saturate the colors of the picture, making it much more colorful than it currently is. That function is also in the Adjustments tool bar.
As you can see, I brought up the saturation to 120. However, I hate the color red with a fiery passion, and this cap now has a lot of red, particularly in their faces. So, we remove it.
Bring back the curves function, and MAKE SURE to hit RESET at the bottom first thing, because whenever you use curves again for this cap, it will open up to the spot you had it before, doing the curves twice. Kinda hard to explain. Just trust me and hit 'reset.' :P Then at the bottom of the curves window, you'll see little tick boxes next to the colors. Deselect the blue and the green, so that only red is left selected.
Then, just mess around with the red until it's an acceptable level for you. If you don't mind the red, you can skip this step, but I think they look better with some of the red removed from their faces.
Okay, as you can see. There's a bit of Prentiss in the bottom left of this cap still. As much as I love Prentiss, let's remove that, okay? Use the rectangle select again and highlight just a tiny spot of Hotch's white shirt and suit jacket right above the part of Prentiss.
Then just drag down and cover up Prentiss like we did before with the sky.
Yay, now it's just Hotch! :) Now that we've done that, we're ready to make this actual icon size. Click on the rectangle select tool again and outline Hotch and Reid, but this time, press the Shift key on your keyboard while you make a rectangle. This will constrain your rectangle to a square, which makes it super easy to then make it 100x100 without warping anybody. :P So select the square this time, and click 'crop to selection' like we did earlier. Mine looks like this:
After that, we need to make it 100x100. Just click your control button and your r key, which is the shortcut, or go up to 'image' and it's the second choice, it just says 'resize.' A box will come up for resizing the picture, and make sure to select the ticky box that says 'maintain aspect ratio.' Then where it says 'Pixel size' type 100 into the width box and it should automatically do the same for height, so that both of them say 100. If not, make sure that your cap is now a square, meaning that the size for width and height is exactly the same. If it's not, go back and rectangle select it again, making sure you're holding down the shift key while you do it. Don't make your rectangle outside of the picture at all, because that will mess up the size, so make the rectangle within the picture.
Okay, once your cap is now an icon, it should look like this:
That's a pretty decent icon by itself, but what I'm going to do is put a texture on the sky to make it look like crumpled paper. To do that, you'll need to go back up to the top and click on 'layers' this time. Make sure you've saved that texture I shared with you at the beginning of this, 'cause now you need it. Click layers and when it drops down some options, click 'import from file.'
Find whatever you saved that texture as, and select it. It will make the texture a new layer.
Now, it will put the texture on top, but we need to be able to see Hotch and Reid for this, so using the arrows that you see at the bottom of the 'layers' box, move the texture to the bottom, but KEEP IT SELECTED. That is very important, because then comes the fun part. What we're going to do is cut the shapes of Hotch and Reid, as well as the ground behind them, out of the texture, so that it will be in the same shape as the sky. To do this, I would zoom in on the icon to about 400x. The zoom in and out tools are at the top, under 'effects.'
Like I did here, use the lasso select tool on the left to highlight Hotch and Reid. It doesn't have to be perfect by any stretch. Then click 'delete' and it will remove that selected portion FROM THE TEXTURE. That's why you have to make sure the texture is still selected, otherwise you'll cut out Hotch and Reid instead. Carefully go back and try to delete any portions that are left, until the texture is now in the shape of the sky. Then use those arrows again to put the texture back on top.
It will look like this. It looks a little messy, no? Don't worry, we're going to fix it. In the layers box, double click on the texture layer, and it will bring up the layer properties box as shown. We're going to bring down the opacity a bit. Like this:
I brought it down to 150, as you can see. Now those little areas around the edges that you missed or that looked rough aren't as visible, and the texture has taken on more of the color of the sky, looking like it belongs more. When you zoom out to 100% again, back to icon size, it will look even better.
The next thing I did was to make the texture layer look even more like the sky from the original icon, and bring up the curves a tiny bit on the texture itself. Just make sure the texture is still selected in the layers box, and click on curves again (the short cut is control, shift, m by the way) and bring up the RBG by just a tiny bit. It will simply brighten the layer a bit and it look better in my opinion.
Then we need to merge the layers into one.
It's the fourth command from either side, and just merge until there's only one layer.
After that, I saturated the whole thing again, just to 105 (but you don't have to saturate it again if you like it without), and then you get the finished product. Ta-da!
And now you know how to make this icon, similar to the one I'm using on this post, using Paint.Net. Woohoo!
I'll be doing a few more tutorials in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled! If you have a favorite icon of mine and would like me to show you how I did it, just leave a comment and I'll try my best. Tootles!
to this ----->
or just this
Whichever one you like better. :)
It's the same way I did the icon I'm using for this post
and this one:
First of all, you can download Paint.Net HERE. It's a redirect page because there's an actual paint company with a similar website, so click on the getpaint.net link to find download links. At the very top on the right hand will be the link you click to actually download the program, above all the flags. DON'T click the big 'DOWNLOAD' images in the middle, as those are ads. Got it? Good.
You'll need this texture for this icon:
HOKAY. We start with this pretty screen cap, which is from Rite of Passage, or episode 19 of season 5, Criminal Minds of course:
I just pulled this straight from the DVD, so feel free to use it for whatever. :)
Save it, and then open it in Paint.Net. It will look something like this:
You'll see on the left you have your basic tools like rectangle select, move pixels, lasso select, etc. Up at the top you have your tool bars. The ones we'll be using are 'Adjustments' and 'Layers.'
So, the first thing we need to do is bring Hotch and Reid down and make the sky bigger. To do that, simply click on the 'move selected pixels' tool on the left (it's the top row on the right). Click anywhere on the picture and it will select the entire thing. Then left click and drag the whole thing down. I went to about the bottom of the V of Reid's sweater vest. It'll look like this:
The white space above this is still part of the pic at this point. Then we need to cut out Prentiss and Morgan, sorry guys. Just take the rectangle select once again and put a big rectangle around Hotch and Reid. Like this:
Then up at the top, in between the tool with the red x and the clipboard is a command called crop to selection. I have it highlighted up at the top of this picture. Click on that, and it will crop the picture to what's inside the rectangle box. Then your cap will look like this:
After you've done that, use the 'rectangle select' tool and box out the top most piece of the sky, making sure not to include that tiny cloud on the right. Select it, and drag it up, filling in the blank space we just made. It should look like so:
Then we get to start making it look pretty! Yay! The first thing I always do is bring up the curves, which will make the cap look brighter and make it a bit more colorful. To do that, go up to the top of the screen to those tool bar things I mentioned earlier, and click on the one called Adjustments. It'll drop down some options, and we want 'Curves.'
There it is! It will bring up the curves box which looks like this:
Sorry, I must have forgotten to resize this particular screencap. Oh well, it works. What you need to do with Curves is make sure it's on 'RGB' and not Luminosity. It will always say Luminosity where it currently says RGB on my cap there when you first open Curves. So just click on the arrow next to Luminosity and click on RGB instead, which stands for Red, Green, Blue. Then just bring up the curves to about where I have. And we're done with the Curves, for now anyway.
The next thing we're going to do is saturate the colors of the picture, making it much more colorful than it currently is. That function is also in the Adjustments tool bar.
As you can see, I brought up the saturation to 120. However, I hate the color red with a fiery passion, and this cap now has a lot of red, particularly in their faces. So, we remove it.
Bring back the curves function, and MAKE SURE to hit RESET at the bottom first thing, because whenever you use curves again for this cap, it will open up to the spot you had it before, doing the curves twice. Kinda hard to explain. Just trust me and hit 'reset.' :P Then at the bottom of the curves window, you'll see little tick boxes next to the colors. Deselect the blue and the green, so that only red is left selected.
Then, just mess around with the red until it's an acceptable level for you. If you don't mind the red, you can skip this step, but I think they look better with some of the red removed from their faces.
Okay, as you can see. There's a bit of Prentiss in the bottom left of this cap still. As much as I love Prentiss, let's remove that, okay? Use the rectangle select again and highlight just a tiny spot of Hotch's white shirt and suit jacket right above the part of Prentiss.
Then just drag down and cover up Prentiss like we did before with the sky.
Yay, now it's just Hotch! :) Now that we've done that, we're ready to make this actual icon size. Click on the rectangle select tool again and outline Hotch and Reid, but this time, press the Shift key on your keyboard while you make a rectangle. This will constrain your rectangle to a square, which makes it super easy to then make it 100x100 without warping anybody. :P So select the square this time, and click 'crop to selection' like we did earlier. Mine looks like this:
After that, we need to make it 100x100. Just click your control button and your r key, which is the shortcut, or go up to 'image' and it's the second choice, it just says 'resize.' A box will come up for resizing the picture, and make sure to select the ticky box that says 'maintain aspect ratio.' Then where it says 'Pixel size' type 100 into the width box and it should automatically do the same for height, so that both of them say 100. If not, make sure that your cap is now a square, meaning that the size for width and height is exactly the same. If it's not, go back and rectangle select it again, making sure you're holding down the shift key while you do it. Don't make your rectangle outside of the picture at all, because that will mess up the size, so make the rectangle within the picture.
Okay, once your cap is now an icon, it should look like this:
That's a pretty decent icon by itself, but what I'm going to do is put a texture on the sky to make it look like crumpled paper. To do that, you'll need to go back up to the top and click on 'layers' this time. Make sure you've saved that texture I shared with you at the beginning of this, 'cause now you need it. Click layers and when it drops down some options, click 'import from file.'
Find whatever you saved that texture as, and select it. It will make the texture a new layer.
Now, it will put the texture on top, but we need to be able to see Hotch and Reid for this, so using the arrows that you see at the bottom of the 'layers' box, move the texture to the bottom, but KEEP IT SELECTED. That is very important, because then comes the fun part. What we're going to do is cut the shapes of Hotch and Reid, as well as the ground behind them, out of the texture, so that it will be in the same shape as the sky. To do this, I would zoom in on the icon to about 400x. The zoom in and out tools are at the top, under 'effects.'
Like I did here, use the lasso select tool on the left to highlight Hotch and Reid. It doesn't have to be perfect by any stretch. Then click 'delete' and it will remove that selected portion FROM THE TEXTURE. That's why you have to make sure the texture is still selected, otherwise you'll cut out Hotch and Reid instead. Carefully go back and try to delete any portions that are left, until the texture is now in the shape of the sky. Then use those arrows again to put the texture back on top.
It will look like this. It looks a little messy, no? Don't worry, we're going to fix it. In the layers box, double click on the texture layer, and it will bring up the layer properties box as shown. We're going to bring down the opacity a bit. Like this:
I brought it down to 150, as you can see. Now those little areas around the edges that you missed or that looked rough aren't as visible, and the texture has taken on more of the color of the sky, looking like it belongs more. When you zoom out to 100% again, back to icon size, it will look even better.
The next thing I did was to make the texture layer look even more like the sky from the original icon, and bring up the curves a tiny bit on the texture itself. Just make sure the texture is still selected in the layers box, and click on curves again (the short cut is control, shift, m by the way) and bring up the RBG by just a tiny bit. It will simply brighten the layer a bit and it look better in my opinion.
Then we need to merge the layers into one.
It's the fourth command from either side, and just merge until there's only one layer.
After that, I saturated the whole thing again, just to 105 (but you don't have to saturate it again if you like it without), and then you get the finished product. Ta-da!
And now you know how to make this icon, similar to the one I'm using on this post, using Paint.Net. Woohoo!
I'll be doing a few more tutorials in the coming weeks, so keep your eyes peeled! If you have a favorite icon of mine and would like me to show you how I did it, just leave a comment and I'll try my best. Tootles!