ugh my icons... they're sometimes good but then, they can be bad!
1. I don't really like #1 since I picked a really LQ cap (here) and I know I picked an LQ cap but I wanted to icon that so badly! But anyway, I'm happy with the coloring but the only problem is the sharpening. PS died on me as I finished the icon and was starting on another so I don't have a psd. 2. IDK. It just bothers me and I don't know why. 3. Again, maybe it's the coloring since I like natural coloring and this icon clearly isn't that but it just looks odd. 4. I was playing around with text and idk again. I like some parts but again, I suck at text usage and this icon was an experiment. 5. It's something about the coloring. Rachel's eyes look rather dark but I think I made the icon for inspired20in20's trick or treat round and I wanted it to look dark at that point but now I'm not so sure about it.
I'm going to talk a little bit about #1, since you mention that it was a low-quality cap but you wanted to work with it anyway. I know how you feel! Sometimes I find a particular picture I want to use and don't want to take the time to hunt down a HQ screencap of it (especially if I have no idea what episode it's from).
My experience with these is that it can be very hard to cut the image out from its background perfectly. On your icon, I can see some lighter bits around the figure that don't merge into the background. For some reason, I find these to stand out much more with LQ caps than with higher-quality ones.
If you use a layer mask to cut the figure out, there is a trick you can use to cut down on those lighter bits, even with low-quality caps. (For this explanation, I'm assuming that you have a black and white layer mask, with the white part on top of the figure and the black part on top of the background you want to get rid of.) Take the smudging tool and smudge along the edges of the white part of the layer mask everywhere that the background still shows -- be sure you smudge from the black toward the white, so that you push the black a little bit inward. This softens the edge of the layer mask, so that when you resize the icon, you don't get those obvious outlines.
You might also think about adding a light layer to the icon that follows the light in the original cap. Right now, you can see that the shoulder on the right side of the icon is brighter, and the one on the left side of the icon is darker. But the background doesn't have a similar shift, which adds to the way that the figure doesn't quite seem to belong there. I know you don't want to add a lot of light layers to a LQ cap, but even a small shift in the background light would help them merge better, and you can always mask her out of it if it shifts the colors on her more than you want.
Thanks for the concrit! I've read those tutorials now and OMG, they're great! Thanks for linking me to them! And in hindsight, I'm seeing the pitfalls of using LQ caps.
I haven't been able to figure out how to get the Topaz plug-ins for PS so I have a bit of a weird workaround for getting the same effect on LQ caps than some of the tutorials teaotter linked you, but I've had a fair amount of luck with it so I figure I'd share it with you.
The first thing I do is I take the cap and then go: Filters > Stylize > Diffuse > make sure diffuse is set to Anisotropic. (You can zoom out within the preview to see what the icon will look at a smaller size.) Then Smart Sharpen (500%, 0.4px you can fiddle with that a bit but I was suggested those settings by a friend and they've mostly worked well so far.)
Which gives you these, which aren't the loveliest I agree.
But, once you resize it to 100x100 and colour, can look like this:
I've also used this technique to get a smoother/painted look and I suppose I generally try to mimic what Topaz does with it. It all depends at which size the cap is when you decide to use the technique. Sometimes sharpen, then diffuse, then sharpen again works better. Play around with it! I used this technique in both of these icons:
As for #4, I think what could have fixed the icon is if the "always" of the quote was smaller so as to still have her neck and the top of her shoulders visible. The fact that she is just peering over top of the text makes it look cramped and busy. Repositioning it away from from her neck would make it feel like the text is the focus of the icon, which I believe is what you were going for, rather than like the text is overpowering and almost strangling her.
Thank you for the beautiful concrit! I really like the coloring method that you took with the first icon instead of cutting out the bg. And, since I have the PSD for #4, I will try to make the text smaller.
1. I don't really like #1 since I picked a really LQ cap (here) and I know I picked an LQ cap but I wanted to icon that so badly! But anyway, I'm happy with the coloring but the only problem is the sharpening. PS died on me as I finished the icon and was starting on another so I don't have a psd.
2. IDK. It just bothers me and I don't know why.
3. Again, maybe it's the coloring since I like natural coloring and this icon clearly isn't that but it just looks odd.
4. I was playing around with text and idk again. I like some parts but again, I suck at text usage and this icon was an experiment.
5. It's something about the coloring. Rachel's eyes look rather dark but I think I made the icon for inspired20in20's trick or treat round and I wanted it to look dark at that point but now I'm not so sure about it.
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There are some good tutorials out there -- wickdshy's Guide to Working with Less Than Ideal Caps, naginis's Sharpening Guide, and tinebrella's Sharpening Workshop come to mind.
My experience with these is that it can be very hard to cut the image out from its background perfectly. On your icon, I can see some lighter bits around the figure that don't merge into the background. For some reason, I find these to stand out much more with LQ caps than with higher-quality ones.
If you use a layer mask to cut the figure out, there is a trick you can use to cut down on those lighter bits, even with low-quality caps. (For this explanation, I'm assuming that you have a black and white layer mask, with the white part on top of the figure and the black part on top of the background you want to get rid of.) Take the smudging tool and smudge along the edges of the white part of the layer mask everywhere that the background still shows -- be sure you smudge from the black toward the white, so that you push the black a little bit inward. This softens the edge of the layer mask, so that when you resize the icon, you don't get those obvious outlines.
You might also think about adding a light layer to the icon that follows the light in the original cap. Right now, you can see that the shoulder on the right side of the icon is brighter, and the one on the left side of the icon is darker. But the background doesn't have a similar shift, which adds to the way that the figure doesn't quite seem to belong there. I know you don't want to add a lot of light layers to a LQ cap, but even a small shift in the background light would help them merge better, and you can always mask her out of it if it shifts the colors on her more than you want.
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The first thing I do is I take the cap and then go:
Filters > Stylize > Diffuse > make sure diffuse is set to Anisotropic. (You can zoom out within the preview to see what the icon will look at a smaller size.)
Then Smart Sharpen (500%, 0.4px you can fiddle with that a bit but I was suggested those settings by a friend and they've mostly worked well so far.)
Which gives you these, which aren't the loveliest I agree.
But, once you resize it to 100x100 and colour, can look like this:
I've also used this technique to get a smoother/painted look and I suppose I generally try to mimic what Topaz does with it. It all depends at which size the cap is when you decide to use the technique. Sometimes sharpen, then diffuse, then sharpen again works better. Play around with it!
I used this technique in both of these icons:
As for #4, I think what could have fixed the icon is if the "always" of the quote was smaller so as to still have her neck and the top of her shoulders visible. The fact that she is just peering over top of the text makes it look cramped and busy. Repositioning it away from from her neck would make it feel like the text is the focus of the icon, which I believe is what you were going for, rather than like the text is overpowering and almost strangling her.
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