Icon guide: Photoshop action, tips & mini tut

[gossymer]

Since people were curious about my coloring in the FMA icons post and since I rarely make icons anyway, here is a Photoshop CS3 action to automatically change the coloring of images (preferably high quality anime screencaps).

I've also added some tips and a mini tutorial on resizing and sharpening.

(Click to zoom)


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And:


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Download the action here

Directions

1. Open a high quality anime screencap in Photoshop CS3 (you can find many @ diminishcap for instance)
2. Load the anime coloring ATN file in the actions palette
3. Zoom out of the image till you're at 50% view and then click play on the anime color boost action

Additional coloring options:

• For more yellows, reds and blues: unhide/show the additional color folder


• If you're image turns extremely blue like this, play the second action extreme blu color fix immediately after the anime color boost action (which results in THIS)
  
  [Note: if it suddenly looks pixelly/choppy. please hide the Black & White 3 layer located in the addtional color folder]

After the action(s), for

• very bright images:
  1. hide the dust n noise reduced layer
  2. unhide/show the Background layer


• very dark images:
  1. hide the dust n noise reduced layer
  2. unhide/show the Background layer
  3. unhide/show the screen layer
  4. Increase the opacity of the screen layer to around 75%

At this point I usually play with the opacities of individual adustment layers to optimize coloring and then do one last selective coloring adjustment layer and one final levels layer.

Resizing into icons - my steps are:

1. Flatten the image
2. Filter/Noise/Reduce Noise with settings: Strength: 10, Preserve details: 9, Reduce Color Noise: 0, Sharpen Details: 14
3. Crop the image to 100px x 100px
4. Use Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen with amount at 140% or so and radius at .2 pixels  (that's POINT 2 pixels)
5. If its still not sharp enough I repeat Smart Sharpen with radius at .3 pixels and amount somewhere between 30% - 80%

Note: At the very end I usually use color dodge and linear burn/multiply layers as demonstrated by sinspire in  this tutorial @ sundry_icons