Tutorial: Textures as a Background
Hello! I'm one of your new iconists, Jamie, and for my first post, I'm going to show you guys how I crop out the white or other background colors in a picture to add a texture behind it. I hope you don't think it's too pretentious that my first post is a tutorial, but I made this up a few days ago and I was really excited to post something here ^^;
Program Used: Photoshop 5.0 (should be transferable to other photoshops)
Difficulty Level: Easy to Medium-Easy (mostly depends on iconing and photoshop experience)
Required to know: How to use layers (make/duplicate)
First off, get yourself a base. It should have a decent amount of negative space so the texture will show through enough. Here's mine!
Isn't she a cutie? 83 Anyway what you need to do is duplicate the background layer this is on, delete the background, and add a colored layer behind it. I would suggest using a bright obnoxious color that isn't shown anywhere on the icon. I chose orange myself. Right now, your layers should look like this.
Next, we're going to highlight the background copy layer, and add a Layer Mask. We do this by clicking on an icon at the bottom of your layers panel that should be a circle with a dotted line. In my version of Photoshop, it's the first one to the left. This is what your layers should look like so far.
Now, make sure you have the white box next to your image in the background copy layer selected (you should only be able to pick black and white as your color choices) and make sure you're using a black brush. Your toolbar at this point should look like this.
So now we're getting to the fun part! What you need to do now is zoom in real close and use your paintbrush to color in on the negative space (for me that was the trees and the building). If you're doing this correctly, the next layer (orange for me) will show up. Make sure you get rid of all the extra pixels hanging around and that there's no random white blotches on your icon. And also, make sure to stick real close to your object. If the pixel is not the color of the object but instead the color of the negative space, it's gotta go. And the great thing is if you mess up you can use the eraser to bring back your image.
Once you think you're done, right click on your layer mask and click "remove layer mask". Now this is SUPER IMPORTANT. When a dialouge box comes up asking you to Add or Remove the layer mask, you must click "Add" or else it'll delete all the hard work you just did! Once you've done that, go ahead and delete the colored layer and you should have this.
Now I believe in newer photoshop programs you can use "insert" for this step. But I don't have insert! So what I did was I opened the texture in a brand new photoshop document, pressed control+A (select all) and then control+C (copy). Then I went back to my base and used control+P to paste it in. (also, fun fact. Control+D is deselect all) Make sure this new texture is on a layer below your image instead of above your image. I'm using a texture by cdg , but you can use whatever texture you'd like.
Now you should probably fix up your object to match the background, and just generally look better. For my own icon, I did about +20 Contrast, and I went into Color Balance and did about +20 Cyan for Highlights and +20 Red for Shadows. (I don't have selective coloring either, or I'd be using that.) My end result turned out looking like this.
and since, well, I'm not going to lie, I didn't really like the outcome of this (I hardly ever do, I'm so hard on myself) here's some other examples of icons where I used this tutorial.
Well, that's all folks! Happy iconing! Oh, and if anything isn't made very clear please feel free to ask questions. I'll be more than happy to help out! And if you could, I'd love it if you showed me some of your end results using this tutorial. Thanks so much for reading! ♥
Program Used: Photoshop 5.0 (should be transferable to other photoshops)
Difficulty Level: Easy to Medium-Easy (mostly depends on iconing and photoshop experience)
Required to know: How to use layers (make/duplicate)
First off, get yourself a base. It should have a decent amount of negative space so the texture will show through enough. Here's mine!
Isn't she a cutie? 83 Anyway what you need to do is duplicate the background layer this is on, delete the background, and add a colored layer behind it. I would suggest using a bright obnoxious color that isn't shown anywhere on the icon. I chose orange myself. Right now, your layers should look like this.
Next, we're going to highlight the background copy layer, and add a Layer Mask. We do this by clicking on an icon at the bottom of your layers panel that should be a circle with a dotted line. In my version of Photoshop, it's the first one to the left. This is what your layers should look like so far.
Now, make sure you have the white box next to your image in the background copy layer selected (you should only be able to pick black and white as your color choices) and make sure you're using a black brush. Your toolbar at this point should look like this.
So now we're getting to the fun part! What you need to do now is zoom in real close and use your paintbrush to color in on the negative space (for me that was the trees and the building). If you're doing this correctly, the next layer (orange for me) will show up. Make sure you get rid of all the extra pixels hanging around and that there's no random white blotches on your icon. And also, make sure to stick real close to your object. If the pixel is not the color of the object but instead the color of the negative space, it's gotta go. And the great thing is if you mess up you can use the eraser to bring back your image.
Once you think you're done, right click on your layer mask and click "remove layer mask". Now this is SUPER IMPORTANT. When a dialouge box comes up asking you to Add or Remove the layer mask, you must click "Add" or else it'll delete all the hard work you just did! Once you've done that, go ahead and delete the colored layer and you should have this.
Now I believe in newer photoshop programs you can use "insert" for this step. But I don't have insert! So what I did was I opened the texture in a brand new photoshop document, pressed control+A (select all) and then control+C (copy). Then I went back to my base and used control+P to paste it in. (also, fun fact. Control+D is deselect all) Make sure this new texture is on a layer below your image instead of above your image. I'm using a texture by cdg , but you can use whatever texture you'd like.
Now you should probably fix up your object to match the background, and just generally look better. For my own icon, I did about +20 Contrast, and I went into Color Balance and did about +20 Cyan for Highlights and +20 Red for Shadows. (I don't have selective coloring either, or I'd be using that.) My end result turned out looking like this.
and since, well, I'm not going to lie, I didn't really like the outcome of this (I hardly ever do, I'm so hard on myself) here's some other examples of icons where I used this tutorial.
Well, that's all folks! Happy iconing! Oh, and if anything isn't made very clear please feel free to ask questions. I'll be more than happy to help out! And if you could, I'd love it if you showed me some of your end results using this tutorial. Thanks so much for reading! ♥