lighten tutorial
How to go from these
to
or
There are a few different ways you can make this. All is subject to your idea. This is just a basic guideline, and I am going to show what you can end up doing. The pictures are not the highest quality, and I was just trying to go fast so this is not by any means perfect.
THIS TECHNIQUE DOES NOT WORK WITH ALL IMAGES!!!!
Start out with two images... they can be of whatever you want, however it's best if they start out semi-dark and are of pretty good quality. Also you don't want the people to be in the exact same pose or facing the exact same direction, that way your icon could end up looking like a two headed monster! :o Which to say the least, isn't cool.
I'm going to start out with screencaps of Tim and Tyra from Friday Night Lights. Screencaps are from In A Dream. If you're just beginning, its best to start out with an image of a face, and one of a fuller body, that way the face can sort of fit in the body... if that makes any sense at all lol. Tim will be the bottom image, Tyra will be on top.
Next, set the second layer (Tyra) to lighten. I now have this
Yeah. Not too pretty. So, what we'll do, is move The layer with Tyra over until you can see both Tim & Tyra's face, and it looks good...
As you can see it's still not that pretty because you can see where the image of Tyra ends...
So, what we'll do is add a layer mask, and erase the edges using a large soft round brush. (If you dont know how to use layer masks, you can just erase it normally using a large soft round brush)
After that we end up with this
Ooooo... pretty, but it's still a little blah... SOOO, we add our coloring (tutorial here) Any coloring you'd like works... But black and white almost always looks good.
Now you can leave it like that for a banner or what not, but if you'd like to make an icon now's the time to crop.
Then resize your image to 100 x 100 and there you go. A pretty icon :]
Enjoy and Feel free to ask any questions you have! :]
Other Examples:
