Tutorial (Big Time Rush)
Hi everyone! I thought I'd share an icon I've worked on and a tutorial that goes with it. The icon:
Program: GIMP 2.6.11
Difficulty: Easy-Medium (depends on how well you know your program)
Translatable: Yes (there are a few pictures of the same icon made with Photoshop Elements 9)
OK, so the first step was getting the screencaps:
The first screencap came from the music video Nickelodeon released to promote the episode and was originally 1280x720, while the second screencap came from an online clip of the episode itself.
Then I cropped the picture a bit so it would fit better on the icon. Originally, I automatically cropped both to100x49 thanks to Photoshop Elements, but I like to work with the original sizes of the caps as much as possible before shrinking to icon size. It's a preference of mine.
The first cap is 909x445, while the second one is 731x358. I shrunk the first cap down to the size of the second cap so I can add both to a square canvas. If I had stretched out the second cap, I imagine it would look more blurry than it already does. I can say this based on experience.
So, next I opened a new file on GIMP, set it to 731x731, and bucket filled it with black so I'd have a nice, solid background to work with. Then I added two transparent layers to the image so that when I add my cropped caps, I can move them around and mess with them separately:
Next, I copied and pasted both caps onto the layers, the first cap on the bottom and the second cap on the top. There should be a small black border in between the two caps:
Not that it really matters, but I adjusted the caps by selecting each "New Layer" by clicking Colors->Auto->White Balance. This way, the coloring of the two caps look more equal to each other. I could just shrink this to 100x100 and call it a day:
However, I wanted to mess around with coloring a bit more. So first, I selected the cap on top and desaturate it by going to Colors->Desaturate
I personally like how "Luminosity" looks best and tend to pick it for all my black and white shots, so I chose it here. I then selected the layer with the other picture and desaturated it as well.
To get the sepia color on the bottom, I kept the layer selected and clicked Colors->Colorize. I then shamelessly stole the values from Photoshop Elements from their "Old Fashioned Photo" guided edit and put the "Hue" at 30 and the "Saturation" at 25. This should give a nice brownish tint:
For comparison, here's what happens if you click Filters->Decor->Old Photo and just click "Sepia":
The script colors the whole picture, and I think it looks a little more faded. Maybe it might work for a different icon. Of course, I could've avoided the whole "colors the whole picture" by working on the caps separately before putting them on the canvas. *shrug* Moving on...
After that, I clicked Layer->Merge Visible Layers (or Ctrl+M), then selected "Clipped to bottom" as my final, merged layer. I've been doing this for all my icons because if I ever move an image around to a point where it goes outside the image, the final result will stay with the bottom layer boundaries. After that, I duplicated the image twice, set the second layer on "Burn" and the top later on "Screen":
I like how the "Burn" layer accentuates the shadows and how the "Screen" filter makes the effect less harsh, so I went with it.
At this point, I merged the layers again and scaled the icon down to 100x100. At this point on, I'll be putting up comparisons between the one I'm doing with just GIMP and the one with both GIMP and Photoshop Elements:
The left icon is the icon I made so far. The one on the right is the original result I got from using Photoshop Elements.
The reason why I scaled the icon is because I decided to try a light texture, and it's 100x100. Specifically, this one by Ransie:
I opened it as a new layer and decided to play with the texture. I discovered that I loved how the icon looked when I duplicated the texture, set the bottom texture layer to "Subtract" and the topmost layer to "Screen." Not sure exactly what's behind it, but I found that the subtract layer keeps the colors of the light texture without ruining the coloring of the icon:
While the screen layer lightens the whole icon:
Once again the left icon is just GIMP, the right icon also made use of Photoshop Elements.
At this point, the icon looks really nice and could be considered finished. However, I really wanted to add some text. It probably wasn't a good idea to experiment with new texts on an icon with lots going on already:
Thanks to some input from the good people over at icon_talk I played around with adding text to the middle of the icon (Check out the original "Help me!" post here for some more text ideas from the awesome commenters). Now, normally if I add text to an icon I do it before scaling the final image down. Since it's already shrunk, I have no choice but to work with what I've got.
First, I opened a new image file and set it to 100x10:
I selected the image and copied and pasted on top of the icon like so:
I decided not to make a new layer to put the border because I wasn't planning on doing anything special with it, so I anchored it.
Next, I selected the text tool on the toolbox and set the font to "Constantina Bold Italic," size 10 px. I picked the font because I like how it looked; scripty enough for my liking and bold enough to be legible:
I then typed the phrase "The Hardest Part is"on top of the white border, like so:
For the word "goodbye," I kept the same font, but changed the font color to white and spaced the letters by 3 px. It's easier to just show what I mean:
And that's it! I flattened the image and got the final outcome:
This was cross-posted to rfmadison (my public creative journal) and gimp_tutorial.
Program: GIMP 2.6.11
Difficulty: Easy-Medium (depends on how well you know your program)
Translatable: Yes (there are a few pictures of the same icon made with Photoshop Elements 9)
OK, so the first step was getting the screencaps:
The first screencap came from the music video Nickelodeon released to promote the episode and was originally 1280x720, while the second screencap came from an online clip of the episode itself.
Then I cropped the picture a bit so it would fit better on the icon. Originally, I automatically cropped both to100x49 thanks to Photoshop Elements, but I like to work with the original sizes of the caps as much as possible before shrinking to icon size. It's a preference of mine.
The first cap is 909x445, while the second one is 731x358. I shrunk the first cap down to the size of the second cap so I can add both to a square canvas. If I had stretched out the second cap, I imagine it would look more blurry than it already does. I can say this based on experience.
So, next I opened a new file on GIMP, set it to 731x731, and bucket filled it with black so I'd have a nice, solid background to work with. Then I added two transparent layers to the image so that when I add my cropped caps, I can move them around and mess with them separately:
Next, I copied and pasted both caps onto the layers, the first cap on the bottom and the second cap on the top. There should be a small black border in between the two caps:
Not that it really matters, but I adjusted the caps by selecting each "New Layer" by clicking Colors->Auto->White Balance. This way, the coloring of the two caps look more equal to each other. I could just shrink this to 100x100 and call it a day:
However, I wanted to mess around with coloring a bit more. So first, I selected the cap on top and desaturate it by going to Colors->Desaturate
I personally like how "Luminosity" looks best and tend to pick it for all my black and white shots, so I chose it here. I then selected the layer with the other picture and desaturated it as well.
To get the sepia color on the bottom, I kept the layer selected and clicked Colors->Colorize. I then shamelessly stole the values from Photoshop Elements from their "Old Fashioned Photo" guided edit and put the "Hue" at 30 and the "Saturation" at 25. This should give a nice brownish tint:
For comparison, here's what happens if you click Filters->Decor->Old Photo and just click "Sepia":
The script colors the whole picture, and I think it looks a little more faded. Maybe it might work for a different icon. Of course, I could've avoided the whole "colors the whole picture" by working on the caps separately before putting them on the canvas. *shrug* Moving on...
After that, I clicked Layer->Merge Visible Layers (or Ctrl+M), then selected "Clipped to bottom" as my final, merged layer. I've been doing this for all my icons because if I ever move an image around to a point where it goes outside the image, the final result will stay with the bottom layer boundaries. After that, I duplicated the image twice, set the second layer on "Burn" and the top later on "Screen":
I like how the "Burn" layer accentuates the shadows and how the "Screen" filter makes the effect less harsh, so I went with it.
At this point, I merged the layers again and scaled the icon down to 100x100. At this point on, I'll be putting up comparisons between the one I'm doing with just GIMP and the one with both GIMP and Photoshop Elements:
The left icon is the icon I made so far. The one on the right is the original result I got from using Photoshop Elements.
The reason why I scaled the icon is because I decided to try a light texture, and it's 100x100. Specifically, this one by Ransie:
I opened it as a new layer and decided to play with the texture. I discovered that I loved how the icon looked when I duplicated the texture, set the bottom texture layer to "Subtract" and the topmost layer to "Screen." Not sure exactly what's behind it, but I found that the subtract layer keeps the colors of the light texture without ruining the coloring of the icon:
While the screen layer lightens the whole icon:
Once again the left icon is just GIMP, the right icon also made use of Photoshop Elements.
At this point, the icon looks really nice and could be considered finished. However, I really wanted to add some text. It probably wasn't a good idea to experiment with new texts on an icon with lots going on already:
Thanks to some input from the good people over at icon_talk I played around with adding text to the middle of the icon (Check out the original "Help me!" post here for some more text ideas from the awesome commenters). Now, normally if I add text to an icon I do it before scaling the final image down. Since it's already shrunk, I have no choice but to work with what I've got.
First, I opened a new image file and set it to 100x10:
I selected the image and copied and pasted on top of the icon like so:
I decided not to make a new layer to put the border because I wasn't planning on doing anything special with it, so I anchored it.
Next, I selected the text tool on the toolbox and set the font to "Constantina Bold Italic," size 10 px. I picked the font because I like how it looked; scripty enough for my liking and bold enough to be legible:
I then typed the phrase "The Hardest Part is"on top of the white border, like so:
For the word "goodbye," I kept the same font, but changed the font color to white and spaced the letters by 3 px. It's easier to just show what I mean:
And that's it! I flattened the image and got the final outcome:
This was cross-posted to rfmadison (my public creative journal) and gimp_tutorial.