A tutorial for sharpening icons.
Here's a tutorial on sharpening icons. It should be common practice for people to take care with their sharpening, but I've seen many examples of abuse around LJ. Let's all stop over-sharpening and make the world a better place!
01: Open this image in your image-editing program of choice (I'm using Photoshop 7.0, but this should translate universally). We are going to lower it to 100x100 pixels while maintaining a healthy and normal-looking level of sharpness.
The key, for me, is to gradually sharpen the image as it's resized down from 400 pixels to 100 pixels. If you save your sharpening for last, you're getting one result and have only the Fade tool (located under Edit) to adjust the sharpness one final time. Even if you use Fade, you've probably noticed that it's rather sloppy looking. Well, that's because the tool has a limited amount of defined lines on which to build sharpness since resizing an image down causes it to lose it's original sharp quality. Sharpening as we resize gives us much more option, and in this case we will be able to use the Fade tool 3 whole times to adjust the sharpness before we reach our desired size.
02: So let's sharpen this image ONCE.
Looks pretty good, not too sharp. If you see too much white and the image starts to look funky, Fade the effect until it looks like the above example. It's not an exact science, but don't go into a resize with a zombie-fied Shannon as this will make the image blurrier. Now resize the image to 300x300 pixels.
Still looks good!
03: Now let's repeat step 02, this time sharpening once and resizing to 200x200 pixels.
The image is still pretty crisp and we've reduced the size in half. Now, going down to 100x100 is oftentimes the most sensitive step and it's 75% likely that you'll have to Fade the Sharpen tool after using it this third time.
04: Sharpen once.
Ack, kinda going off into that nasty zombie area. Thankfully we have the Fade tool! Let us utilize it now. Under Edit, you will find a Fade Sharpen option available. A sliding bar pops up and we can manually adjust the Opacity of the effect used.
I found 65% to be better than the full-on 100%, so I went with that. Again, it's not an exact science- sometimes you'll fade it much more and sometimes you won't have to fade at all. With lower-quality caps, you can usually get away with more sharpening, but you'll probably have to fade the third sharpen with higher quality images.
05: Now, the final resize! Let's go down to 100x100 pixels.
And there we go, a nicely defined base! Was it really worth it to go through all those steps? Do I have to do all of these 4 steps whenever I make an icon? Let's compare the tutorial's finished product with some other bases made from the same starting image.
<- Using tutorial
<- Simply resizing starting image in one step, no sharpening.
<- Sharpening once after resizing, icky white line appearing on Shannon's shirt.
Of course, some of you might like the white line that results from over-sharpening or are looking for a blurrier base to work with, so those of you that do, just move on and forget ever reading this tutorial. Cleaning up bases and coloring using curves is next up on my list, so hopefully you have something to look forward to.
Tip: If you like to add contrast by duplicating the base layer and setting it to soft light, try blurring the soft light layer. It'll keep the added contrast from over-sharpening your image.
01: Open this image in your image-editing program of choice (I'm using Photoshop 7.0, but this should translate universally). We are going to lower it to 100x100 pixels while maintaining a healthy and normal-looking level of sharpness.
The key, for me, is to gradually sharpen the image as it's resized down from 400 pixels to 100 pixels. If you save your sharpening for last, you're getting one result and have only the Fade tool (located under Edit) to adjust the sharpness one final time. Even if you use Fade, you've probably noticed that it's rather sloppy looking. Well, that's because the tool has a limited amount of defined lines on which to build sharpness since resizing an image down causes it to lose it's original sharp quality. Sharpening as we resize gives us much more option, and in this case we will be able to use the Fade tool 3 whole times to adjust the sharpness before we reach our desired size.
02: So let's sharpen this image ONCE.
Looks pretty good, not too sharp. If you see too much white and the image starts to look funky, Fade the effect until it looks like the above example. It's not an exact science, but don't go into a resize with a zombie-fied Shannon as this will make the image blurrier. Now resize the image to 300x300 pixels.
Still looks good!
03: Now let's repeat step 02, this time sharpening once and resizing to 200x200 pixels.
The image is still pretty crisp and we've reduced the size in half. Now, going down to 100x100 is oftentimes the most sensitive step and it's 75% likely that you'll have to Fade the Sharpen tool after using it this third time.
04: Sharpen once.
Ack, kinda going off into that nasty zombie area. Thankfully we have the Fade tool! Let us utilize it now. Under Edit, you will find a Fade Sharpen option available. A sliding bar pops up and we can manually adjust the Opacity of the effect used.
I found 65% to be better than the full-on 100%, so I went with that. Again, it's not an exact science- sometimes you'll fade it much more and sometimes you won't have to fade at all. With lower-quality caps, you can usually get away with more sharpening, but you'll probably have to fade the third sharpen with higher quality images.
05: Now, the final resize! Let's go down to 100x100 pixels.
And there we go, a nicely defined base! Was it really worth it to go through all those steps? Do I have to do all of these 4 steps whenever I make an icon? Let's compare the tutorial's finished product with some other bases made from the same starting image.
<- Using tutorial
<- Simply resizing starting image in one step, no sharpening.
<- Sharpening once after resizing, icky white line appearing on Shannon's shirt.
Of course, some of you might like the white line that results from over-sharpening or are looking for a blurrier base to work with, so those of you that do, just move on and forget ever reading this tutorial. Cleaning up bases and coloring using curves is next up on my list, so hopefully you have something to look forward to.
Tip: If you like to add contrast by duplicating the base layer and setting it to soft light, try blurring the soft light layer. It'll keep the added contrast from over-sharpening your image.