As my mom would say: Monday morning quarterbacking.
I'm never completely happy with the icons I make myself. Not even with the ones I *like* and decide to use. Maybe those least of all. I mean, every time I look at them I kind of feel proud, but they also kind of drive me crazy with fault-finding!
Anyway, the other day I found a pretty straightforward tutorial on Photoshop curves - which I've never understood even a little bit, an actual copy of Photoshop for Dummies notwithstanding. And it was raining cats and dogs today, and I was at school and needed to walk home, but I didn't have an umbrella or anything with me. In short, I was stalling.
It occurred to me to test out Photoshop curves on copies of some of the icons I've made for myself over the last year - maybe see if I could bump the colors up a notch so I'd find them a little more satisfying. (Most of my icons have been colored, if at all, with the Photoshop 'selective color' feature or with iphoto. I've only just begun using the 'hue/saturation' feature instead, and it does seem to work better than 'selective color,' even if I'm still on wobbly legs with it). I made copies of my icons right out of my allpics, and then took just a couple of minutes with each of them, doing the best I could to improve them, first with curves and then with hue/saturation. The curves feature, I found, does have a kind of magic about it, but it's so hard to control! I know exactly what each slider does in hue/saturation, but all I can do in curves is scoot the little anchor dots around and see what happens. I have no way of *predicting* how the colors are going to change, and that bothers me a little. Which probably explains why I couldn't seem to produce similar results with both features.
I don't save Photoshop copies of any of my icons (since I make them on school computers and then delete them to cover my tracks, LOL), so I couldn't touch text or layers, and I didn't bother to make selections to color separately, which I usually would. (Keeps faces from turning too red and all that rot). Thus, none of my results were bound to be what you'd call ideal. If I had degraded the color variation of the original image with my ham-handed Photoshopping the first time around, no amount of re-messing with the colors was going to put that variation back! But I produced the below: a side-by-side comparision: original, original + curves, original + hue/saturation. I think the hue/saturation ones are winning, overall, but my preference varies from example to example.
And *nothing* seems to make this one look better:
It's kind of anti-climactic how similar they all look on the Lappy, when they looked different almost to the point of tastelessly extreme (hee) on the desktop at school. I have yet to grow any sophistication where colors are concerned. I just see a color and think, 'BUT CAN WE MAKE IT BRIGHTER?'
Muahaha.
ETA: Now that I look at them on the school computer, the all look alike here, as well. HOW? I seriously had them side by side in Photoshop and was all, like, 'I dunno, the profound greenish tinge... too much?' But they're not even all that different from the originals. I don't get it! I watched them change before my very eyes, LOL!
.
Anyway, the other day I found a pretty straightforward tutorial on Photoshop curves - which I've never understood even a little bit, an actual copy of Photoshop for Dummies notwithstanding. And it was raining cats and dogs today, and I was at school and needed to walk home, but I didn't have an umbrella or anything with me. In short, I was stalling.
It occurred to me to test out Photoshop curves on copies of some of the icons I've made for myself over the last year - maybe see if I could bump the colors up a notch so I'd find them a little more satisfying. (Most of my icons have been colored, if at all, with the Photoshop 'selective color' feature or with iphoto. I've only just begun using the 'hue/saturation' feature instead, and it does seem to work better than 'selective color,' even if I'm still on wobbly legs with it). I made copies of my icons right out of my allpics, and then took just a couple of minutes with each of them, doing the best I could to improve them, first with curves and then with hue/saturation. The curves feature, I found, does have a kind of magic about it, but it's so hard to control! I know exactly what each slider does in hue/saturation, but all I can do in curves is scoot the little anchor dots around and see what happens. I have no way of *predicting* how the colors are going to change, and that bothers me a little. Which probably explains why I couldn't seem to produce similar results with both features.
I don't save Photoshop copies of any of my icons (since I make them on school computers and then delete them to cover my tracks, LOL), so I couldn't touch text or layers, and I didn't bother to make selections to color separately, which I usually would. (Keeps faces from turning too red and all that rot). Thus, none of my results were bound to be what you'd call ideal. If I had degraded the color variation of the original image with my ham-handed Photoshopping the first time around, no amount of re-messing with the colors was going to put that variation back! But I produced the below: a side-by-side comparision: original, original + curves, original + hue/saturation. I think the hue/saturation ones are winning, overall, but my preference varies from example to example.
And *nothing* seems to make this one look better:
It's kind of anti-climactic how similar they all look on the Lappy, when they looked different almost to the point of tastelessly extreme (hee) on the desktop at school. I have yet to grow any sophistication where colors are concerned. I just see a color and think, 'BUT CAN WE MAKE IT BRIGHTER?'
Muahaha.
ETA: Now that I look at them on the school computer, the all look alike here, as well. HOW? I seriously had them side by side in Photoshop and was all, like, 'I dunno, the profound greenish tinge... too much?' But they're not even all that different from the originals. I don't get it! I watched them change before my very eyes, LOL!
.