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oh_crime2019-01-10 08:45 am
timetobegin) wrote in oh_crime2019-01-10 08:45 am
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Tutorial : Icon Making Basics Part 1
PART ONE:
A little about software, cropping, colouring and layers + saving and uploading your icons!
Software
I use photoshop CS4, and some things are not translatable. CS4 is a fairly old copy, but it does what i need it to at the moment. I have downloaded gimp to see what is translateable. Gimp is a free software, that you could use for your image editing. So this tutorial will mention both. If you don't want to pay for or aquire photoshop (*cough*) then gimp is a good option and can be found here: https://www.gimp.org/
I also use a wee product called https://www.irfanview.com/, which i use for viewing and as basically another window to look through images, and textures. I don't know if that's helpful but its good for having images open alongside my photoshop, which i keep pretty clean.
Screencaps
I get most of my caps from image galleries, and here is a very much not comprehensive list. I start my search with googling "stargate screencaps" for example. There are a lot of multi-fandom screencap galleries that i look at, or if desperate i make my own.
http://ladymanson.com/ShadowofReflection/home.php
http://screencapped.net/
http://kissthemgoodbye.net/
http://thetvshows.us/
http://captoit.flaunt.nu/
http://www.homeofthenutty.com/
If you need help finding screencaps, let me know.
For this tutorial, we're going to be using this screecap, because a)Vala, and b)it's older, so it's not as "easy" to work with compared to the bigger, more high-quality screencaps. I really encourage you to find a high-quality screencaps you can - it's easy to make a good screencap look good. A bad screencap will never look much betteer.
CROPPING
I work with icons that are 200x200px and then size them down near the end. I just find it easier doing some of the detail work, compared to the small icons and often i find it makes sharpening easier too.
Aspect Ratio I'm going to use ifran view to resize my screencap, and the most important thing is to keep the aspect ratio intact. I'm not going to lie, not having the right aspect ratio is something you can pick up quite quickly as making your icon look "off". The aspect ratio is ensuring that the image is the same proprotion even though it's getting smaller.
In infranview, i went to image > resize
In photoshop, i would go to image > image size
In gimp, i found image > scale image
You can see three things circled, firstly - creating the new size, in pixels. So i made this 250px and 440px, and i've ticked "preserve aspect ratio". This means that it will automatically add in the height it will be for 250px. If not, your icon will look skewed. In photoshop, this is "constrain proportions", and in gimp it seems to do it automatically.
I also circled the "half" tool - i like to use this when i don't know what sort of crop i might like, and i just go down to half until get some inspiration LOL.
Cropping is really up to you, you can crop to the left, right, center, up, down depending on the look you want to get. for example, this is side, center, far away/negative space, and close crops. When you look at other peoples icons you'll get all sorts of ideas on how to crop.
In both photoshop and gimp, i was able to get this by resizing my image, putting it on my canvas and then moving it around until it fit! I did have to choose the "move" tool in both, if it wasn't selected.
Photoshop move tool:
Gimp move tool:
Honestly, a good icon is often about the cropping so getting used to making a crop that you like is really helpful!
Once you've got the crop you like, now it's time to move onto colouring.
COLOURING
The only colouring i'm going to focus on today is brightening/lightening, because that's OFTEN what screencaps need. Some screencaps are already very bright, and it could be that you experiment with softlight and multiply layers.
A lot of the work in Photoshop is done via layers and image > adjustments. The first thing i do in prettttty much every icon is do duplicate the layer and set it to screen. If you aren't sure if you have layers open, go to window and click "layers". This is what my set up looks like: (click for larger)
I have my image in the center, tools down the left and layer tab (and history tab) on the right. History helps when i make a mistake - you can go back to the previous actions.
You can see in the layer tab i have the background image, and my crop of Vala. right click on that layer, in this case "layer 6" and duplicate that layer. It will give you a copy of the layer. You'll see a little drop down box with "normal" in it, drop this down and select screen.
In Gimp the only real difference that i had to do (and its possible i'm just doing this wrong) is that i had to right click > anchor layer before then right click > duplicate layer. It looked like this
I use screen because it lightens the image and brightens it a little. If it's still quite dark, you could then repeat that process another 1-2 (or occasionally more) times. Eventually it will look quite washed out. On Vala, i duplicated my screen x3 in PS and x2 in Gimp, and then i added a soft light layer.
In both photoshop and gimp i duplicated the layer at the top, and then set this layer to "soft light". This adds back in some contrast which makes it look more "shiny" in my opinion. First image is Photoshop, the second is gimp
This is the only colouring i'm going to run through today, because screen + softlight is a really basic way to clean up almost any image. Here are the results, which are pretty similar, the gimp is darker because it had less screen (and the crops are different)
Original image >> Photoshop result >> Gimp result
To save these, on photoshop i "stamped" it which means i created a layer that is a replica of how my image looks by clicking ctrl+shift+alt+e, but you can also just right click and "merge visible"
In gimp, i also just right clicked and "merge visible".
You can then save that image and it would be your final product.
Software
I upload all my icons for this comm via https://imgur.com/ which is free and handy
you can also upload via your dreamwidth account https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit
or, if you're making an icon for yourself, just upload straight to your icons!
NEXT UP ON BASIC ICON MAKING: Sharpening/blurring and some other colouring techniques! HERE IS PART TWO
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Eta: I am lucky, as I have worked with gimp before to resize my fanart, but layers were a mystery to me. I’ll try them out now.
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