Icon tutorial: colour enhancement in 7 easy steps
Program(s)+version: Photoshop CS4
Involves: Auto Contrast, Curves, Smudge tool, brush work, texture use, Vibrance
Translatable: Not entirely, because it involves Variations. But you can work around them with Hue/Saturation.
Steps: 7
Difficulty: Easy, trust me
With Photoshop CS4, we'll be re-creating this icon:
>
shrimpy_19 and xtine005 asked me about this icon and I happen to love it - so here's a tutorial and an explanation of my thought process, as requested by absolutelybatty.
I'm warning you: it's rather long. ;)
This icon was created for a challenge at icondare. The challenge was 'repetition'. I was a trial maker at the time, so I wanted to do something people wouldn't expect from me. I had to, because the members at the community had decided they weren't sure whether or not my work was good enough. So I felt I had to show them something new, something they hadn't seen from me.
absolutelybatty asked me about my thought process for icons like this and I'm glad she did. I think my biggest challenge to improving as an icon maker is expanding. I think I have some decent skills, but I need to get more creative and I need to push myself to not follow my standard procedures or simply do the things that come most natural to me. Some people excel at close crops. I don't. It's not that I completely suck at them but they don't come natural to me at all (which is why I'm working on them now). When I watch a film or television show or when I see screencaps or other pictures, my mind goes: "Ooh, that would make a great icon if I extended the background that way" or: "Look at that light! Can you imagine how great that would look if I cropped it in a corner and had all this negative space there?"
You get the idea.
Anyway, to improve as a maker, I need to think outside of my own box so to speak and being a trial maker at icondare helped in that respect because I had to figure out something to impress the members who didn't think I was good enough to be a full member of their community.
So I wanted to create a repetitive element that wasn't 'standard' but that also built on something that I think I do best: negative space. Basically, I wanted to diminish the repetitive aspect of the icon as much as I could. ;)
This screencap from The Fall by letsey-x seemed perfect for what I wanted to achieve.
Step 1
I cropped it so that the characters were just a little off-centre so there would be room for the repetition. I try to use the rule of thirds in all my icons as much as I can - or at least keep it in mind where I can.
Step 2
I extended the canvas upwards (Image > Canvas size) with the background colour a blue I took from the original cap with the eyedropper tool:
My base now looks like this:
Step 3
I copied this base and set it to auto contrast (Image > Auto Contrast):
Auto Contrast is useful to me because it gives an indication of the contrast already present in your image. If you see a big difference in your image before or after Auto Contrast, your original image had low contrast and (part of) that is now already fixed. If there's not a big difference, you know that fiddling with the contrast is not something to worry about in your main process, because the image is already nicely contrasted. The good thing about Auto Contrast is also that you can always fade it if you think it's too much contrast. Right after you have clicked on Auto Contrast, go to Edit > Fade to lower the amount of contrast.
Step 4
Then I used the smudge tool to smudge the background so that the entire background was blue:
When the background has a more or less solid colour, I set my brush (a round one with soft edges, the size depends on how large the canvas is and how much room there is between the edge of the original image and the people/lines on it) to 100% opacity. When there is texture or different colours in the background, I set it to a lower opacity and have to do much more work to get a gradual feel to the background. For this all-blue background, the smudging was easy.
Step 5
The image needed to be a lot brighter, so I created a new Curves layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) with the following settings in the RGB channel:
Lower point - output: 66 | input: 73
Upper point - output: 188 | input: 156
I just pull on the line to create a curve, but if you want to experiment with actual numbers, just click on the black arrow on the bottom to get those boxes where you can put your numbers. See here. If you want to learn more about Curves, you should check out this fabulous guide by talipuu at mirrorskies.
The icon now looks like this:
Step 6
You can see that the colours are already very similar to the end result. The only thing that changed between this and the end result is adding this texture by lemonpunch and setting it to overlay. This adds the texture but in a way that also lightens the image up. I don't remember the exact percentage, but you can see in the end result that it was lowered from 100%
(It could be that there was a Vibrance layer involved at the end as well. I do that often when I've uploaded an icon and the colours look different online than they do on my MacBook, stupid screen calibration. If your program does not have Vibrance layers, you can get a very similar result with a Hue/Saturation layer.)
Step 7
I went back to the base to smooth some of the lines with a (very small) soft round brush at a low opacity and then I merged the image and moved it into a new document to use that new document as my canvas to create the repetition. I'm sure you can image how the cropping of the repetitive elements went: I cropped them and then played around with different sizes on the original icon to see how small they needed to be to add to the composition rather than distract from the larger crop.
The end result is this:
I was inspired by this textured feel by some of the icons I had seen from the absolutely amazing talipuu at mirrorskies. I had no idea how they achieved their look (and still don't) but was determined to find a way to give my icon a textured feel somehow. For some reason I came across that texture in one of my folders and just decided to give it a go. It was the first texture I picked and it was a straight hit. I wish I could say there was more thought put to it, but sometimes, you just have luck and an icon turns out even better than you hoped.
So you see, this is really a much simpler icon than it looks.
I hope this was helpful to any of you. As always, if you have a questions, don't hesitate to ask. :)
Involves: Auto Contrast, Curves, Smudge tool, brush work, texture use, Vibrance
Translatable: Not entirely, because it involves Variations. But you can work around them with Hue/Saturation.
Steps: 7
Difficulty: Easy, trust me
With Photoshop CS4, we'll be re-creating this icon:
>
shrimpy_19 and xtine005 asked me about this icon and I happen to love it - so here's a tutorial and an explanation of my thought process, as requested by absolutelybatty.
I'm warning you: it's rather long. ;)
This icon was created for a challenge at icondare. The challenge was 'repetition'. I was a trial maker at the time, so I wanted to do something people wouldn't expect from me. I had to, because the members at the community had decided they weren't sure whether or not my work was good enough. So I felt I had to show them something new, something they hadn't seen from me.
absolutelybatty asked me about my thought process for icons like this and I'm glad she did. I think my biggest challenge to improving as an icon maker is expanding. I think I have some decent skills, but I need to get more creative and I need to push myself to not follow my standard procedures or simply do the things that come most natural to me. Some people excel at close crops. I don't. It's not that I completely suck at them but they don't come natural to me at all (which is why I'm working on them now). When I watch a film or television show or when I see screencaps or other pictures, my mind goes: "Ooh, that would make a great icon if I extended the background that way" or: "Look at that light! Can you imagine how great that would look if I cropped it in a corner and had all this negative space there?"
You get the idea.
Anyway, to improve as a maker, I need to think outside of my own box so to speak and being a trial maker at icondare helped in that respect because I had to figure out something to impress the members who didn't think I was good enough to be a full member of their community.
So I wanted to create a repetitive element that wasn't 'standard' but that also built on something that I think I do best: negative space. Basically, I wanted to diminish the repetitive aspect of the icon as much as I could. ;)
This screencap from The Fall by letsey-x seemed perfect for what I wanted to achieve.
Step 1
I cropped it so that the characters were just a little off-centre so there would be room for the repetition. I try to use the rule of thirds in all my icons as much as I can - or at least keep it in mind where I can.
Step 2
I extended the canvas upwards (Image > Canvas size) with the background colour a blue I took from the original cap with the eyedropper tool:
My base now looks like this:
Step 3
I copied this base and set it to auto contrast (Image > Auto Contrast):
Auto Contrast is useful to me because it gives an indication of the contrast already present in your image. If you see a big difference in your image before or after Auto Contrast, your original image had low contrast and (part of) that is now already fixed. If there's not a big difference, you know that fiddling with the contrast is not something to worry about in your main process, because the image is already nicely contrasted. The good thing about Auto Contrast is also that you can always fade it if you think it's too much contrast. Right after you have clicked on Auto Contrast, go to Edit > Fade to lower the amount of contrast.
Step 4
Then I used the smudge tool to smudge the background so that the entire background was blue:
When the background has a more or less solid colour, I set my brush (a round one with soft edges, the size depends on how large the canvas is and how much room there is between the edge of the original image and the people/lines on it) to 100% opacity. When there is texture or different colours in the background, I set it to a lower opacity and have to do much more work to get a gradual feel to the background. For this all-blue background, the smudging was easy.
Step 5
The image needed to be a lot brighter, so I created a new Curves layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) with the following settings in the RGB channel:
Lower point - output: 66 | input: 73
Upper point - output: 188 | input: 156
I just pull on the line to create a curve, but if you want to experiment with actual numbers, just click on the black arrow on the bottom to get those boxes where you can put your numbers. See here. If you want to learn more about Curves, you should check out this fabulous guide by talipuu at mirrorskies.
The icon now looks like this:
Step 6
You can see that the colours are already very similar to the end result. The only thing that changed between this and the end result is adding this texture by lemonpunch and setting it to overlay. This adds the texture but in a way that also lightens the image up. I don't remember the exact percentage, but you can see in the end result that it was lowered from 100%
(It could be that there was a Vibrance layer involved at the end as well. I do that often when I've uploaded an icon and the colours look different online than they do on my MacBook, stupid screen calibration. If your program does not have Vibrance layers, you can get a very similar result with a Hue/Saturation layer.)
Step 7
I went back to the base to smooth some of the lines with a (very small) soft round brush at a low opacity and then I merged the image and moved it into a new document to use that new document as my canvas to create the repetition. I'm sure you can image how the cropping of the repetitive elements went: I cropped them and then played around with different sizes on the original icon to see how small they needed to be to add to the composition rather than distract from the larger crop.
The end result is this:
I was inspired by this textured feel by some of the icons I had seen from the absolutely amazing talipuu at mirrorskies. I had no idea how they achieved their look (and still don't) but was determined to find a way to give my icon a textured feel somehow. For some reason I came across that texture in one of my folders and just decided to give it a go. It was the first texture I picked and it was a straight hit. I wish I could say there was more thought put to it, but sometimes, you just have luck and an icon turns out even better than you hoped.
So you see, this is really a much simpler icon than it looks.
I hope this was helpful to any of you. As always, if you have a questions, don't hesitate to ask. :)