005. Icon tutorial!

[thrall]

Hello, I have never posted one of these before.

HOW TO GO FROM BLAND TO SLIGHTLY LESS BLAND

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Some of these techniques were absorbed from akirasama and others. For this tutorial, I'm using Photoshop Elements 1.0 due to busted laptop. Should be translatable. :3



STEP ONE

Crop your image and resize to 100x100. Or something like that. This is Deneb from Kamen Rider Den-O in his OTZ position.





STEP TWO

Now you're going to attack this layer with the Levels option until you have something looking sort of bland, but brighter.



My input levels are in the range of as follows: 0 / .75 - 1.15 / 200-215 depending on what I'm doing.



STEP THREE

When you have something decent enough to work off of, duplicate the icon layer and set the filter options to Soft Light @ 70-80 percent. You should end up with something mildly more colorful, like this:





STEP FOUR

Now, duplicate the soft light layer and set it to Screen at around 30-50 percent. You'll see why.





STEP FIVE

Now is when you decide whether or not you want a soft, pretty touch to the icon or something sharper. I'll show you both ways, but in the end I'll choose the sharper image for convenience's sake.

For a smoother look, filter the Screen layer to Gaussian Blur @ 2 pixels.


For a sharper look, filter the Screen layer to Sharpen More.




STEP SIX

Still looking kind of bland? This is where personal touch comes in.

I set an Exclusion layer to 50 percent and filled it with #080037, or a dark, saturated blue. You can also use this trick with Lighten if you don't want the rest of your image to go pink. Experimenting with purple and aqua-blue is also fun. :3



Tadaaaa! And that's it, really. I added text for fun, 'cause I'm a dork.



Hope this helped! ♥