Icon bases

[microxcuts]

My question is how do you prepare bases? I crop and rezise pictures, but sometimes it doesn't work and the image quality becomes tragedic. I read once that people blur the picture a little before rezing it. What is your opinion? Base advices are welcome :)

Comments

[liona5]

Hello,
Do you save them right after that?
Maybe is it because you save your images in JPG, if so try in PNG, it's better for the quality, JPG gives a bad quality...
Hope it helped.

[sidhex3]

for icon making, saving as a high quality jpg is just fine.

OP, try having a look through the basics: cropping tag for some helpful tips.

*mod sid

[faerielissa]

My general rule of thumb is to crop to a size that'll resize easily. For icons, I'll first crop the are of the picture I want to either 200x200 or 400x400 pixels. That way, when I resize, the aspect ratio stays exactly the same, which helps preserve the quality of the original image when I resize down to 100x100.

[shalowater]

sometimes "unsharp mask" helps. use it before you resize to 100 x 100. eg. you have a very large cap. resize it to half its size then use "unsharp mask" with settings like this

radius : 0.70 strength : 50-70 clipping : 1

it tends to prevent blurryness or pixelation. i either read it or somebody told me but i have been using it lately and it works well. i make alot of bases. you can look on my journal (click my name)

you can try using a blurred layer too on a low opacity. you can set that layer at soft light. my friend told me this tip. it tends to smooth the icon/base

[microxcuts]

That's exactly what I need, I'm gonna try it. Also, I've used some of your bases and of course credited you in my Icon credits post.

Thanks everyone!

[proggrrl]

Thanks for this... I'm gonna play around with these suggestions. Getting fuzzy final 100x100 icons is one of my biggest icon making problems that I need to fix now that I have Photoshop. (I'd been making basic cropped images in Imagewell and Mac Preview etc before this.)

[shalowater]

you are welcome. i use paint shop pro with these settings but i am sure that photoshop is similar. if not, there is more people with photoshop than paint shop pro i am sure.