Here is the product of as many photoshop filters applied as I could possibly justify within the span of 15 minutes years of icon making practice mostly after looking at a few tutorials on some icon-making help site somewhere.
I know you're all foaming at the mouth to see how I took it from its very drab, already photoshopped-to-death source to what you see above, so here's a step-by-step of what I did:
1. Googled 'movie screenshot', selected the first image to appear on the image search (
in this case Gerard Butler in all his sepia-shaded glory)
2. Cropped it, because cropping is EVERYTHING
3. Saturated the hell out of it, and for bonus points put in some psychedelic color balance and levels action. My goal was to get the weirdest colors possible from the source without totally going into acid zone. I don't even care if there are big ass patches of burn out white, that just makes it more awesome and not blinding at all
4. Layered filters (film grain and something else, I don't even care) because filters are way cool and I didn't want to seem like I was just cropping and uglifying some random picture, which I totally am but now the filters justify what I'm doing
5. Added some pointless but meaningfully vague text. By the way, the text that's too small to read says "text that's too small to read for no reason". I used Edwardian Script because Spartans totally had Edwardian Script as one of their main fonts, true facts. It's not because I want it to look pretty like a post card so you'll be touched by my meaningfully vague text
6. Added a black border and tilted and let the text run off the edge to make it pop and give it some semblance of composition OH MY GOD DID ACTUAL ART THINGS GET PUT IN THERE
7. I posted it with this tutorial without explaining why any of this is good or bad in terms of art, lol.
Fifteen minutes of Photoshop filter love, man. And possibly copyright infringement, but hey, I didn't exactly feel like hunting that down just for this post.
So, what's up, LJ friend-people?