icon tutorial o1.
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icon tutorial o1.
non-translatable; photoshop cs3
The first thing I always do when I get an icon base is, before i resize it to 100x100, make sure that it's not too pixely. I just zoom in and use the soften or the blur tool to lightly just remove any bits that look too pixely; thus we have our base!
First things first! Layer -> New Layer -> Exclusion 100%. I despair when an icon with a white background doesn't have a coloured background, so first thing I do is make sure that I give it a nice background colour. Normally I use blue because I have a tendency to enjoy blue icons more, but if you prefer other colours it's good to experiement! For this icon I used #312525.
It looks really dark and nasty now, but all I wanted was a background colour to work from, so now I can get on with making Flynn stand out against his pretty blue background. I duplicated my base, brought it to the top and put it on Soft light, 88%. The percentage you use now will depend on how light or dark you want your icon to be later, but it's fine to go back and play arond with the opacity when the icon's done.
Now to make Flynn stand out! Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Selective Color. I wanted to make Flynn's hair and armour stand out more than anything else, so that's what I aimed for, especially with the Cyans layer.
Reds: -100, +100, +100, +38
Yellows: -100, -58, +71, +14
Cyans: +100, +100, +100, +100
Blues: +100, +71, -67, 0
Now Flynn's starting to stand out against his background. I then duplicated the Selective Color layer and set it to between 25-30%, just to make it a little bit brighter.
Still, I thought the icon appeared a little too under-coloured, if you get what I mean, so! Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Color Balance. I adore colour balance: you can get such a lovely range of colours from just playing around with it. Like I said before, I like blue-ish colourings so that's what I was aiming for when I played around this time:
Midtones: +9, -10, +14
Flynn's face doesn't look so bright and awful anymore and there's still that pretty blushish-ness about it, so I was quite happy. Still, I wanted the blue to stand out a little more so I decided to added a Channel Mixerlayer. Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Channel Mixer. This was so I could bring out the blue and lighten it up a little, making it all stand out somemore.
Red: +100, 0, -2
Blue: 0, 0, +110
If the icon still doesn't seem bright enough, I'd suggest using a Hue/Saturation/Lightness layer and bumping the Saturation up to 10/12. It'll make it a lot brighter!
And there we have it! It's always good to play around and test out your own opacitys and layers, as tutorials are really just guides for making icons: I'd love to see everyone's results!
Other icons using this tutorial:
⇝comments are appreciated!
⇝i'd love to see your results~