Annie Edison Disapproves (Tutorial)
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Tutorial: Annie Edison Disapproves
Program: Photoshop 7
Level of Difficulty: Eh, easy-medium
Tools: Heavy on curves. Uses brushes, layer masks, filters, and other super basic tools.
Translatable? As much as curves are translatable, yes.
Requested by dudette_in_town at my Ask the Maker thread where you can ask questions & request tutorials at any time!
Some useful tutorials in case you aren't familiar with some of the tools I'm using:
- Basic Layer Mask Guide
- Master Guide to Curves
- An Easy Guide to Curves
- A Non-Professional Guide to Curves
Right so I'm basically doing this from memory because I didn't save the .psd file, and it required a lot of fiddling to get correct in the original. Therefore, the end result is not quite the same. I've tried to get it as close as I could, but there was only so close I was going to be able to get. At any rate, the steps are more or less the same.
Grab your screencap. This one came from rawr caps (here). Thank you Jess! ♥ Anyway, to begin with I worked with the full screencap because, at the moment, I'm kind of obsessed with seeing how the coloring looks on the image as a whole and then going about the cropping so that I can highlight particular aspects of the coloring I like or what have you. So, for the first half of this tutorial, I'm working with the cap at the original size on a 50% screen.
>>STEP ONE<<
Getting rid of the logo at the bottom. I go about this one of three ways.
METHOD #1: Just use the brush tool. This is for those of us who are lazy and/or for things that are more or less solid in color. In this case, you can get away with it because a) it is more or less solid in color and b) the full cap is re-sized straight for the final product so that bottom corner is going to be difficult to see anyway. So create a new, empty layer, grab the correct color using the eye dropper tool, and then use which ever brush strikes your fancy to brush that logo away.
METHOD #2: Use the clone tool. The clone tool and I have our disagreements. It always wants to grab part of the logo that I'm trying to erase. Never the less, it can be pretty useful. So click on the clone tool, alt+click part of the cabinet door not covered by the logo, create a new layer, and brush over the logo. Magic!
METHOD #3: I've been practicing using the smudge tool to effectively erase and/or add to an image. You can find a great tutorial on this method here.
In this particular icon, I definitely used method #1. And then the logo is gone and we may all rejoice. (Brief Note: Because I am a loser, I forgot to get rid of the logo until later on in my re-creation of this icon. Just go with it, lol.)
>>STEP TWO<<
I think the cool people call this "base preparation". I call it "the part of the tutorial that feels redundant".
Duplicate the base layer twice (by now I've probably merged all the layers that were created to cover the logo just for simplicity's sake). Set the bottom layer to screen and the top layer to soft light both at 100% opacity. And there you go; we've lighten the cap and added some contrast. In this case, the effect is quite strong, and you can really see the difference between the base image and the base after prepping.
versus
>>STEP THREE<<
Coloring the image! In this step we will be using the following tools: brushes, curves, variations, and the diffuse glow filter.
Alright, so I'm going to let you guys in on a secret here. The secret is: I really, really love purple. Purple is a flawless color. So that plus the fact that Annie's shirt already had various different shades of plum in it is what spurred me to go for a purple color scheme in this icon. However, you will notice that the cap, aside from the shirt, doesn't really have purple in it. Solution? ADD PURPLE YOURSELF.
Thanks to Jess (who has several lovely tutorials that you can find here) I was, at that point, really starting to get into using brushes to seriously add color. So I made a new layer on my canvas at the top, grabbed a soft brush, picked a purple color out from the color palette (#850289, to be exact), and proceeded to brush over the entire background (but not Annie) with purple. Now the ting about this particular technique is that it can look a little silly. So the best way to go about it is to change the blending mode of your brush layer. Have a scroll through your blending mode list and find what works best. For me, I set this layer to screen and kept it 100% opacity.
Alright now if you look at the finished product, you'll notice that while the background is definitely purple, Annie herself is rocking a much warmer color scheme. In order to achieve that look, I used a curves layer. In order to enhance the yellows in an image (with curves) you need to play with the opposite channel (which would be blue). So open curves and go to the blue channel. Then figure out which way is blue and which is yellow for you; I'd tell you, but my photoshop is contrary and I think my curves goes backwards seriously. I mussed around with the curve until I got a result that I liked. The end curve looked like this.
Alright. At this point, the image still has too much blue. So I pulled out one of my favorite tools for tweaking the overall color scheme of the icon: variations! You can find it by going here: Image > Adjustments > Variations. When you pull it up, you'll get a menu similar to this. Make sure you have the 'original' selected (because variations saves your last selection), and then, if my eyes do not deceive me, it looks like one click on magenta and one click on lighter. This served to emphasize the overall purple color scheme (while still preserving the warmth on Annie) throughout the icon and...to brighten things up, obviously.
But apparently I wasn't happy with that because this next step kind of backtracks just a little bit. It is another curves layer, and we are once again fiddling with the blue channel. This time, however, I pulled the curve in the blue direction and added a whole bunch of blue back into the image! The final curve looked like this. However, I only wanted this effect on the background of the cap; so I used the layer mask, a soft, round brush, and I masked the curves layer off of Annie's face.
The last two steps serve as light/contrast/whatever additions. The first layer will use Diffuse Glow and the second will use curves.
I copy merged all my layers and pasted this new layer on the top. I went to Filter > Distort > Diffuse Glow and edited my settings to taste. It was pretty bright though, I can tell you that. At least +10 if not more in the Glow Amount. I then set this layer to soft light at 100% opacity. However, at this size it kind of makes her face look funny; so I added a layer mask, and masked away the effects of the layer from her face only.
Then I added another Curves layer. This layer has two jobs: the first is to brighten the cap, and the second is, once again, me fiddling with the blue channel. The final curves look like this: RBG CHANNEL | BLUE CHANNEL. These curves brightened the cap quite a bit (and at full cap size it almost seems like too much), and also added some more yellow to counteract all the blue from before. Sort of seems redundant to go back and forth between the yellow and the blue, I guess, but you have to keep fiddling until you find the balance that suits you; sometimes that takes a lot of tweaking.
>>STEP FOUR<<
Blocking out the composition! The particular Community batch this icon came from had quite a bit of blocking, but I'll be honest; I'm not really a huge fan of blocking by using the image repeatedly. I don't hate it, but it isn't my favorite technique in the world. However, I had a few different Annie screencaps picked out, but no real inspiration on how to make them look good. They weren't caps I was happy just center cropping and being done with it.
So I decided to use the cap itself as a "background" so to speak. It's kind of a difficult method to get right because you really risk weakening to focus of your icon. So you have to choose certain things carefully, and usually that mean you mess around and move things around a lot. So if you are reading this, and you feel like this particular type of composition inspires you, my advice would be to stay flexible about it. Move things around, make different versions, and make sure you have a clear focus for your icon in your head at all times (pick one point, one cap, something, and make sure nothing detracts from that).
ANYWAY. What I usually do is take the original colored cap, and resize it down to working icon canvas size (right now I'm having fun with 250x250, but I've worked with 300x300, 200x200, and of course straight 100x100 canvases before as well), and then keep it in the middle. Keeping it in the middle kind of assures that the focus is going to stay there because it is in the freaking middle, you know? Haha, anyway, everything else is going to go behind the cap in the middle.
And then it is all about fiddling around with different sizes and positions to see what works for you basically. In this case, I used a bigger version of the cap behind, and then moved the cap to the outer edges to create a "border" effect around the icon. The bigger version of the cap was twice the size of the middle cap, and then I just copy merged my icon to drag around and create borders. There's a border on the top, the bottom, and the left side of the icon.
Then a blur + sharpen to taste and re-size down. Viola! Icon.
End Notes:
- If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
- No, I won't provide a .psd because I don't have one. Awesome.
- Please feel free to link to this in any guides if you so wish.
- Again my Ask the Maker thread is here.
- This icon was originally posted here, and you can find all my Community icons here.
Next post will be icons, I swear! ♥