» tutorial 009; all i am is a body adrift in water, salt and sky
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A few notes, before we start:
» This icon was originally posted here, for the Chapter One Sidequest: Colour Palettes at theiconquest.
» Program: Photoshop CS5.
» Difficulty: Easy.
Requested by zhaoxun! Sorry this took so long :')
Here's the original screencap we'll be working from, courtesy of homeofthenutty :)
While I was making this icon, I was working on getting it to match the third colour in the palette above (the light green).
I think I'd selected the colour I was going to work towards before picking out a cap, and then when I came across the cap of Harry in the field the colours already seemed to be halfway there. For some reason I thought it'd make my colouring job easier... but as you'll see, I still needed a ridiculous number of steps to get there. Oh well, lol.
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01. So first, I made about the most basic crop you could possibly make for this cap, lol. It's super dark, so I made a new auto curves layer and created two new points in RGB: (85, 67) to brighten up the shadows and (180, 173) to brighten everything else a little bit as well.
02. Alright, let's see if we can get some of those greens to reveal themselves before we start having to force them out: new vibrance layer, +100.
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03. This texture by 3psy, set to screen 100%, adds just the tiniest hint of grunge and lights up the edges a little bit.
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04. I decided I wanted to get rid of some of the yellow tones, so I went hunting for a blue texture and found this one by ellaangelus. After flipping it horizontally (EDIT > TRANSFORM > FLIP HORIZONTALLY), I set it to soft light 60%.
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05. Alright, let's introduce some greens in here with a colour fill layer (#7ccc63) set to soft light 100%.
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06. This texture by ellaangelus does so much for lighting, and all you ever have to do is set it to soft light 100%. I ♥ it with every fiber of my iconmaking being ♥
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07. Another one of my favourite textures, set to soft light 75% this time. This one's by sinking_theship, and it does glorious lighting and gradient things at the same time as getting me a step closer to the light green I'm working towards.
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08. Next, I picked out this texture, obviously by tinebrella, because 1) just look at it, all of it. Why not use it and hope some of its perfection will rub off on my icon? and 2) It's green! (...Obviously I have a very picky process when picking out textures.)
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09. Alright, what this icon is lacking right now is some depth, and to do that, my favourite method is to go back and duplicate the original base, drag it up to the top, gaussian blur it (FILTER > BLUR > GAUSSIAN BLUR > 2.0) and then set it to soft light. Usually the original base is pretty dark, too, which always helps to add some shadows.
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10. The greens are getting a bit too... green... for where I need this icon to be, so by using a soft light pink colour fill layer (#d3a8a5) it gets brightened up a bit and there's a hint of warmth added too, to make it a little more yellow.
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11. I decided I liked that effect and wanted to continue in that vein of lightening things up, so I went and copy merged all (CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-E), gaussian blurred it, and set it to screen 35% for a soft, bright effect.
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12. Alright, let's get started on matching the colour in the palette. Make a fill layer with the colour to be matched, and set it to multiply 100%.
Well, that doesn't look like the colour we were aiming for, at all.
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13. So take the same colour, and set it to screen 50%.
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14. We're not done mucking it up yet! Let's reverse some of the effects of the multiply layer and brighten it a little more now by taking this texture by lessrest and setting it to soft light 47%.
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15. Now let's try to bring the shadows back. Copy merge everything, gaussian blur it at 2.0 pixels, desaturate it (CTRL-SHIFT-U), then go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST (-10, +100). Set it to soft light 100% and voila! Some contrast! (But... not really.)
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16. It's not enough, right? So let's go back and duplicate the base, drag it up to the top, and FILTER > OTHER > HIGH PASS (10.0), then set it to soft light 100%. This calms down and desaturates some of the intensely blurry yellows, and brings back some of the original sharpness and contrast of the base.
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17. This texture, by lessrest, is going to be perfect to add some subtle little movement and lines. First, desaturate it, then decrease the brightness -100.
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18. But if we were to set that to screen, it would be too overpowering, so let's go and decrease the brightness -50 and increase the contrast +100 before we finally set it to screen 100%.
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19. Everything's a little too washed out still, so let's take a dark yellow (#606043) and set it to soft light 100%.
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20. More! Copy merge everything, desaturate, then set it to soft light 100%.
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21. Alright, we're going to try to get closer to the colour now, and we're going to use IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > MATCH COLOUR. But! we're not going to use the actual colour we want to match, since it'll make everything entirely too dark (similar to when we used multiply & screen fill layers before). So instead, open a new canvas and fill it with a similar, but lighter, colour.
Now we're going to use the match colour tool. Set the Source: to the canvas filled with the colour we're going to match, and make sure Layer: is set to Merged. Play around with the settings until you get a good result; luminance brightens/darkens (I used 80 in this case), colour intensity is similar to a specific vibrance (185), and fade affects the opacity of the fill (75).
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22. And again, pump up the contrast!! Take a black to white gradient map and set it to soft light 100%. Ahhhhh, it's starting to look way better.
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23. Sharpening time! FILTER > ARTISTIC > PAINT DAUBS > (1, 1), with a layer mask to mask out the parts that get too pixellated.
Ok like sometimes I wonder why I wait so long and always leave sharpening to the end because LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE. It's just... everything just gets clearer and looks less yucky and sdlkfj this is my favourite part of making an icon, when I sharpen it and everything looks much less crappier than it did before. (lol, idk)
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24. And this is the part where I thought the colouring was boring and this icon needed an extra oomph. So, copy merge everything, duplicate it, then flip the lower layer vertically to go along with those barely noticeable vertical lines running through the entire icon.
On the top layer, use the rectangular marquee tool on a fixed size setting (width 94 px, height 100 px) and create a new layer mask so the previously hidden flipped layer can be seen in bars.
And uh this seemed like a good place to end this icon ◔_◔
Comments would be great, and if you have anything else you'd like to ask, feel free to continue to hit me up here! I'm still working through the last few tuts haha (─‿‿─)