Iconning in Photoshop Guide
Hay there kids and welcome to Iconning 101.
I've decided to write this for a couple of reasons, mostly because I thought it might be helpful, and partly because I'm bored.
So briefly, what this guide will cover:
--How to screencap anime or videos for icons.
--How to set up your workspace.
--How to crop, resize and sharpen icons.
--How to use levels to clean a manga icon.
--How to change the hues and levels in a colored icon.
--How to put boarders on icons.
--How to make an automated action.
--How to use automated actions on a batch of icons all at once.
--Random useful tips.
Please note that this guide only covers Photoshop. I do not have an upload of Photoshop for you guys, but I'm sure if you ask around you can find a hack somewhere. I suggest getting Photoshop CS or CS2 if at all possible. But Photoshop 8 is what I use, and as far as I know all versions function more or less the same.
Also, while this guide does not cover Paint Shop Pro, which is a decent photo imaging software, a lot of the details on how things work is more or less the same across the board. If you prefer to use Paint Shop Pro, this guide will probably still be able to help you with some minor translations.
Also note that I will be using a lot of screenshots, so under the cuts it might get a bit image intensive.
How to Screencap Videos-
For screencapping, BSplayer is my player of choice. You can get a download of it here.
I'm not going to go over, in detail, how it works, since I think we're all used to poking around these things.
Just go to preferences, which is the far right icon that looks like a hammer. From preferences click the YU2Y formats box. Under that you can select what directory you want your screencaps to go into. And under that you can select file format. I suggest jpeg.
Basically, all you have to do is hit "P" whenever you want to cap whatever is showing on the player. It will only cap what is playing in BSplayer (you can set it up to cap the entire computer screen if you want through). You can arrange things so different keys will do that though. I personally have it up so either space or double-click pause, and have my middle mouse button screencap.
Anyway, this way you can just watch through an entire episode while periodically capping stuff.
How to Set Up Your Workspace-
It sounds silly, but this is rather important. There are a lot of features with Photoshop, and what you need is very limited. It's also quite customizable, so you might as well use that to your advantage.
This is my layout.
See how in the bottom right box, the tabs Navigator, Info and Histogram are all in there? Typically History and Actions are also in the same box like that, however with simple click and drag you can separate them. I switch between History and Actions constantly, so I suggest giving them their own boxes.
Typically, these are the only windows you will need. If you're doing flashy pretty icons, you may need the Layers tab open, but since in CFUD we usually just use screencaps, I won't cover that.
To bring out these tabs go to Window on the top toolbar and make sure you have the same things as me checkmarked.
Actions, History, Navigator, Options and Tools. Tools is the vertical bar you see the left of the screen, and Options is the horizontal bar at the top which should be anchored there.
Options bears a bit of explanation. It's a versatile bar which changes depending on which tool you have selected. For example, in the screen cap of my layout, I have the Move Tool selected, and the Options bar is full of choices like "Auto Select Layer" or "Auto Select Groups", which only pertain to the Move Tool.
FOr the most part, you won't be using the Options bar. Mainly if you need to erase or draw on an icon, you'll find resizing and opacity variables for the brush or eraser up there. Also the Options bar has some useful abilities when using the Crop tool, which I'll explain later.
Another thing to point out is the background color for my canvas. The black area all around Ed there is the background. On default it is gray, which is probably what you see. But in the case of icons I find it more useful to make it all white or all black.
To change the background color go to the foreground color box on the Tool bar, in the image it's the bright pink box.
Double click the box and the Color Picker will appear. By adjusting the slidebars you can pick your color. Once you have the color you want hit Okay and close the window.
Now go to the Paint Bucket Tool on the Tool Bar and select it.
If you cannot find the Paint Bucket Tool, it may be under the Gradient Tool.
Right click the Gradient Tool and select the Paint Bucket Tool.
Now just hold down shift and left-click anywhere on the background.
And presto chango~
Incidentally, if you are the type to use Photoshop for other things, you can save multiple workspace arrangements so the right windows will automatically be there for whatever you want to do.
Just go to Window >> Workspace >> Save Workspace on the top tool bar.
Once you save the workspace, it will appear under Window >> Workspace. As you can see "Closed - Right" is a saved workspace of mine. You can click any of your options at any time to have the right windows appear in the right place.
And that's about it for setting up your workspace.
How to Crop, Resize and Sharpen Icons-
Okay, here are the most basics of iconning. Most of you probably already know cropping and resizing. So I will move through that quickly. I'll put more detail into sharpening though, since there seems to be a general lack of sharpening out there.
So here we have Sasuke looking bitchy as usual. And we want to icon him cause hay, he's still sexy.
Select the Crop Tool located on the Tool bar.
If you hold down Shift and left-click anywhere on the image, and then drag, you will create a perfect square with your Crop Tool. If you let go of shift, you can make any shape or size of rectangle you want. But since icons are ideally 100x100 pixels, I tend to habitually hold down shift.
There are several things to note about this image.
First of all, the part of the image you are cropping is obviously within the box, the darkened part is the "shield" and is what will disappear once you crop the image. If you look on the Option bar, you can change the shield to whatever color you want, you can also make the Opacity whatever percent you want.
You can grab and drag the edges of the cropping box to change the size of it. But if for some reason you don't want to crop after all, or you want to start over, look in the upper right color. The "NO" sign there will cancel your cropping selection. The checkmark next to that will okay it. If you don't cancel your crop or okay it, you won't be able to do much.
Once you have decided on the are you want to crop, either hit the checkmark or else double-click within the selected area.
Now that you have the area you want selected, it's time to think about sharpening.
There are basically two ways to get a clean icon.
You can either
-Crop
-Sharpen
-Resize
-Sharpen
or you can just
-Crop
-Resize
-Sharpen
It's not necessary to sharpen prior to resizing on many icons, and on others it's very useful. Because the base for this icon is large and not very detailed, sharpening it first isn't necessary. On an icon with more detail, sharpening prior to resizing will hel keep you from losing that detail when it's reduced to 100 pixels, and will help make the icon less mucky.
Nice it's not really necessary on this icon, we'll skip it.
To resize an image you want to go to Image >> Image Size on the top toolbar.
And up comes the Image Size window.
What you want to look at is the 'Pixel Dimensions' area. First of all, the chain image on the right should show that width and height are linked. If it doesn't look like this image, click that icon. This will make sure that the height and width stay relative to each other.
Also, you want to make sure the drop down bars say pixels. If it says percent, change it.
Now just enter 100 into width or height and hit okay.
You now have an image the size of an LJ icon.
Now, I know a lot of you would go "oh that's pretty" and hit save and upload it. DON'T DO THAT! If you do I will be sad. Unsharpened things are not pretty, they're hard to make out and they hurt my eyes.
So here is what you do.
Go up to Filter on the top toolbar, then down to Sharpen.
For now you want to pick the "Sharpen" option, but I'll explain briefly what all of these do.
Sharpen - Basically, it reads the colors of the pixels and makes the ones that are next to each other and of a similar color the same color. This is a good way to make a file smaller, as each image is composed of less information. It also makes things much easier on the eyes when in a small size like a 100 square pixel icon.
Sharpen Edges - Same thing as Sharpen, only more... selective? It basically tries to keep the area to hard edges in the picture only. I never use it as it's not actually that 'intelligent' and tends to look back.
Sharpen More - Roughly the same thing as hitting "Sharpen" twice. You'll only ever need this on VERY fuzzy images.
Unsharpen Mask - I will cover this in more detail later. It is basically Sharpen only you can precisely vary options, and subsequently group colors more, use less or more colors and make things more or less sharp.
Smart Sharpen - As far as I know, only Photoshop CS2 has this option. It's an addition to Unsharpen Mask, which allows you to vary the Opacity of the mask you're applying.
Anyway, select just regular old Sharpen.
And check out the difference.
Clear, right? Not as distracting either and is less work for the eyes. If you want to find out how to add a pretty boarder to this, keep going.
How to use Levels to Clean a Manga Icon-
Okay. MOST scanslated manga has always been cleaned by the time you get it. But assuming you are scanning your own stuff, or working from raw scans, the images you are working from won't be black and white so much as a whole lot of gray.
Here we have a nice gritty picture of Namine.
Note that it isn't icon size yet. You almost ALWAYS want to play with levels or any any variation options, on an image that hasn't been minimized. This is because things can be editted in much more detail if you have more detail to work with.
Now, first of all, note that she isn't ACTUALLY even in completely gray values. You'll be hard pressed to find any grayscale manga that are naturally gray when you scan them. If you are partial to completely desaturated icons, then go to Image on the top tool bar and down to Adjustments and then click Desaturate.
And what you get is this:
Not a huge difference, but it bleached out some of those blueish tones. I personally like having a bit of color in there, gives it more flavor. But up to you.
Now on to actual levels.
First of all, make sure you are on a RGB or CYMK color set up. RGB stands for Red Green Blue and basically means that every color you see is a mixture of a certain amount of Red, Greed and Blue. CYMK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and blacK and means the same thing as with RGB. CYMK will allow you to ultimately have a greater range of colors, but it also takes up a LOT more space (an icon left in CYMK mode and saved as *.jpg will push 700kb). Thus you want all icons saved as RGB or Grayscale. However, I personally like to put my icons to CYMK while I'm editing them, as you'll get greater effects.
Up to you what you wanna do. But go to Image at the top tool bar again. And this time go down to Mode, there you see all the options you have available to you.
Now, once you are on a channel which will allow you to play nicely with levels. Go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels... and you will get the following box.
This is your level adjustment box.
You can actually do a whole fucking lot with this box. I don't even know how much detail you can get into with it. So I'll just cover the most basic parts.
The "Channel" drop down menu at the top should be on RGB or CYMK, depending on which you're working with. This means it will effect all of those colors equally and at once.
Now, look at the graph I have here.
See the arrows under the box? There are three. One is black, one is gray and one is 'clear'. These represent at which point on the spectrum that black and white start, and how close to black or white the midtones are. It's hard to explain so you're better off just toying with it yourself, you'll get it.
Now see on the graph the large black spike toward the right? This means most of the pixels in the picture are toward the whiter end of the spectrum. Where I to inverse the Namine image, it would be more dark than light, and the graph would show a large spike on the left instead.
And do you see the way that the graph tapers toward the left? And how it doesn't even START until a good ways in? This not only shows us that the image doesn't have many dark colors, but that even the darker grays are still a far cry from being actually BLACK. Where there any true black in this image, the graph would show right over the black triangle.
Cleaning an image with levels is pretty simple. What you want to do is tell the image to shorten the spectrum of color available to it. Basically, by moving the black arrow toward the right, it will steadily make all the dark grays darker. By moving the white arrow to the left, it will make all the light grays lighter.
Now you can see for yourself. I moved the white arrow to the left, the black arrow to the right. Most of the lightest grays in the picture, which were making up the background of the image, have been turned white. Meanwhile the darker grays that made up the lineart have been darkened more. I also moved the gray arrow over to the right slightly. This means that more of the midtone grays would go darker instead of lighter, making the lineart look more solid.
Also, remember that channel bar from before?
Well, I'm too lazy to explain how it works in detail. But BASICALLY a channel is each color that goes into making a picture. In my case Red, Green or Blue. By hitting the drop down bar you can select one of these colors and adjust the Levels of just that one color.
It gets complicated because if you were to say, move the Black arrow over while on the Green channel, you wouldn't be making it a darker green. Black represents "lack off" so what you would get is less green, with more blue and red showing through. Play with it if you like. Similarly, moving the white arrow would amount to giving the image more green.
How to Change the Hues and Levels in a Colored Icon-
In the last section I covered Level's pretty well. So in this one I'm going to cover Hues and combine them with Levels a little bit. But if you want to see HOW I did what I did with Levels, you'll have to read back.
So here we have Lina with an awesome expression. Only... she's in the dark. She's also purple. Let me tell you. I learned a lot about hue since picking up Lina, who's always in weird lighting in the movies =\
First of all, let's take her out of the dark. If you want to, you can use Auto Levels, which is right under the usual Levels options:
Sometimes this works really well. In a situation where a character ISN'T in dramatic light like this, just in slightly too dark lighting, it will usually lighten and brighten things nicely. I will usually hit Auto Levels to see how it looks, and if I don't like it, just go back on my History tab.
But since here she's in lighting with a lot of contrast, the Auto Levels make her skin way too bright, and if I were to minimize it she would look like a shiny blob with hair. Purple hair.
I went into levels and manually lightened it just a bit. Enough so that the whites of her eyes were... more white, but not so much her skin started to glow. The icon will still have dramatic lighting, and still be a little on the dark side, but as long as you can see Lina's expression I can live with that.
Now what we need to do is play with the Hue. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Hue is... the color part of the color. When I say the word color you probably think of things like red and yellow etc. In fact, every color is made up of three components: Hue, Value and Saturation.
Hue is the most saturated and unadulterated version of any color. That is to say, the most red of red, the most blue of blues. The most lime green of lime's greens. What I mean is when you change JUST the Hue, you will not make a color darker, you will not make it lighter. You will not make it more or less saturated or 'gray'. You will only make it more red or more orange or more green or what-have-you.
That said. Go to Color Balance under Image >> Adjustments >> Color Balance. (Incidently, if you have the time, play around in the Adjustments menu. It is your god. You can do just about ANYTHING to an image by toying with those bad boys).
The Color Balance menu looks like this:
Okay, here is a brief lesson in color.
Red, Orange and Yellow are "warm" tones while Green, Blue and Purple are "Cool" tones. If you put warm tones and Cool tones together, they're going to gray each other. By gray I mean the colors won't be as vivid or saturated. If you put cool tones with cool tones they will saturate each other. Each color on the color wheel has an exact opposite. The 'opposite' of red, for example, is green. Opposite colors gray each other most specifically. So if you were to mix equal amounts of red with equal amounts of green and if they were both of exactly opposite hues while exactly the same saturation, you would get gray.
This is why Lina's hair is not at all saturated in this picture. The warm brown (which is a dark orange) has been overlaid with a dark violet.
Now people are almost always warm. In anime they might have blue hair, but skin tone is still warm. And I don't mean yellow. Skin isn't yellow. If your skin is yellow you are in desperate need to add some red hue.
Which brings me to where the Color Balance bars. Not now currently each "Color Level" is on zero. This is relative to the picture you are editing. It doesn't mean your picture has no red, it just means you haven't yet added any red.
Also note the three bars. Cyan - Red, Magenta - Green, Yellow - Blue. These are placed opposite each other because they are opposing on the color wheel.
For an extreme example, here is what happens if I move the arrow on the Cyan - Red bar to the left.
That's as much Cyan as I can get when the Color Balance set to midtones.
If I undo that and set it to Highlights instead, you can guess what happens.
Cyan only gets added to the brighter colors.
So what you need to do for this icon is take what you know about how it SHOULD look (brown hair, palely tanned skin) and how it DOES look (lavender skin, purple hair) and what you know about color to make it look right.
In this case, the picture is too cool. It's safe to say we need more of EVERY warm tone, so I'll adjust those.
Closer, but now it's too pink. Maybe the Magenta wasn't the kind warm we wanted.
And now that I think about it, using more Green instead of Magenta did a great job of canceling out a lot of the Magenta that was making up the purple. Also, though I don't snow it. I went through and put yellow and green into the shadows, and red and yellow into the highlights. With the exception of the highlight in her hair, which still has a slight purple cast to it, you can no longer tell Lina is sitting in a dark room lit only with purple light.
Now that that much is done, I apply an unsharpen mask (because I like them, most people wouldn't even notice the difference) and minimize and sharpen again... and then add another unsharpen mask cause it was still too fuzzy for my taste.
Here you can see the final product vs how it would have looked if it'd only played with the levels to brighten it up. Not the best icon in the world, no. But at least it isn't purple anymore.
Here are some more examples, just briefly, of the joys of using Levels. Games, I think, are most notorious for being too dark in places. These are some screencaps I have left over from making Riku's icons. The left size is the icon only resized and sharpened. The right side is with the addition of levels.
Notice how even when the icon wasn't originally that dark. Adjusting the levels does a lot for it.
How to Put Boarders on Icons-
This is BLISSFULLY SIMPLE after everything else I've written about.
Have open the icon you want to put a boarder on. Go to the top tool bar for Select >> All.
This selects the entire image. Now you want to go to Edit >> Stroke, again on the top tool bar.
That will bring up the stroke menu.
Basically, what stroke does is it 'strokes' within (or without) the selected line. It will follow that line with a depth of however many pixels you want, in whatever color you want.
The settings you see on my menu are the ones you typically want to use. Inside stroke, one pixel width with black. For my magic or alchemy icons I use a three inch white boarder. You can click the black box to select whatever color you want. Similarly, you can go down and fiddle with the blending and opacity if you want something more fancy.
Hit okay and save and you're all set.
How to Make an Automated Action.-
Okay, now that I've taught you how to do everything individually, I'm going to show you how to do it automatically.
That's right. Photoshop comes with a beautiful little feature called the automatic action, which will allow you to record a series of actions and then replay then on any image as many damn times as you want.
First, let's take a look at the Actions tab.
Above, you see my Actions Tab. Within the Icons folder there are several actions: RBG and Save is just what it sounds like. It will convert any image to RPG format, save it and close it. Save as Jpeg saves the open image as a Jpeg file, I made that back when I'd accidentally saved a whole lot of images as *.png on accident. Make png/rgb icon is my "make an icon" action, though the name no longer fits. That action converts to CYMK, uses a Unsharpen mask, resizes the icon to 100x100 pixels, uses Sharpen and converts back to RGB at which point I can decide if that was what I wanted or not. If it isn't what I wanted I will go into the History tab and back up, deciding at what point the process went off track and adjust the icon manually. Boarder makes a 1 pixel black boarder around the icon, saves it and closes it and White Boarder makes a 3 pixel white boarder around the icon.
As you can see, you can do virtually anything with an Action. Furthermore, you aren't required to make a completely new action if you just want to make minor changes.
Here I've opened up the Make png/rgb icon action. You can now see each step this action takes my image through and how it specifically remembers the settings on each step. Note how while it uses "Unsharpen Mask" twice, it uses different settings each time.
The cool thing is, you can edit this action any time you want to.
First. See how the checkmark across from Make png/rbg icon is red? That means that this action is not currently using all of it's steps. If you look down you'll I've unchecked the second Unsharpen Mask, because I don't always want it. If the step isn't checked, it will skip that step every time you play the action until you re-check it.
Furthermore, if you want to keep a step but change the details of it, just double click on that step. If, say, I wanted to have my second Unsharpen Mask set to sharpen to a radius of 8.0 pixels, all I have to do is double-click "Unsharpen Mask" and change the settings, then hit okay.
Pretty nice, hm? So here's how you make one.
Look at the very bottom of the Actions tab, see the button I've squared in red? This is probably the only one that bears explaining, but I'll say what they all do.
Square - first button - This is the "stop" button. You pretty much only use this to stop recording.
Circle - second button - Record. Once you hit this the program will 'record' any action you do. Not stuff like moving your mouse, but resizing, selecting, changing formats, even saving and closing it will record.
Triangle - third button - Play. You need to have an action selected (or a specific step within an action selected) to hit this button. When you do it will do all the recorded steps to the image you have open.
Folder - fourth button - New Folder button. Hit this to make a new folder you can put your actions in and group them as you like.
New Layer - fifth button - The one in the red square. This is the "New Recording" button. Hit this and you will get a box asking you what the name of your action is going to be, and what folder to put it in.
Trash bin - sixth button - You can drag any action, step or folder to the trash bin to delete it.
Anyway, hit the New Layer icon. The box that pops up is pretty straight-forward. Name your action, choose the set to put it in (this is the folder thing). You can key it an F-key if you think you'll use it a lot, and you can give it a color to help better organize if you like that kinda thing.
Once you hit okay your action immediately starts recording.
Now? Do whatever you want. I personally suggest you scroll back up and go through the steps to make a boarder action. Maybe you like doing the rest by hand. If you don't, I suggest making an icon button which will resize and sharpen your icons however you like them. Remember, you can always go back through the history tab step by step if you want to change something.
Once you've done everything you want to do, hit the stop button. And you're done! You can hit play whenever you want to use that action again.
How to Use an Automated Batch.-
Okay, the big one of all usefulness. "Aviy," you say. "This is all great," you say. "But," you say." "I'm not going back and doing all this shit to each one of my fucking five hundred icons one at a time," you say.
WELL that's all very reasonable. LUCKY FOR YOU there is the glorious batch automate option.
Exactly what it sounds like. You can make an Automated Action and then run that Action on every goddamn icon you have, all at once.
First off, go to File >> Automate >> Batch on the top tool bar.
Then you get the Batch Automate Window:
Under Set: you choose which folder the Action you want to use is.
Under Action: you choose which action you want to run.
Under Source: you choose where the files are coming from. Basically there is 'Folder' where you'll select the directory from your computer. 'Open Files' where it will run on all the files currently open in Photoshop, and 'File Browser' which... I don't know.
So assuming you're set to Folder, you click "Choose" to pick the directory. You can, if you like, include all sub folders, which is useful if you organize yours icons like I do.
"Suppress color Profile Warnings" -- sometimes when you open images you will get a "discard imbedded profile" query. THEOREHTICALLY this matters when you view an image, but I've personally never noticed it and I always discard them. If you don't discard them you'll have to go manually set your color mode to CYMK or RGB. Anyway, make sure you have that box clicked or else your Automate might get held up.
MY ONE BIG SUGGESTION HERE is that you make sure you have "Save" and "Close" in whatever action you run. Otherwise Photoshop will open up all of your 509 icons one after another, and will try it's fucking best to crash your computer.
Anyway, then you're all set! Hit okay and let her fly.
Random Useful Tips.-
Okay, I actually only have one useful tip for this section, but it's a doozy so here it goes.
Time to talk about the History tab, kids.
Okay, look UNDER The three pictures of Lina. See the list of actions? Open, CMYK Color, Unsharpen Mask etc? These are the actions I've done to this image. The most recent think I did was "Color Balance" which is why it's on the bottom of the list. If I were to click any one of those items though, my image would backtrack to that point. For example. HIt Image Size? We'd go back to just before I made my icon 100x100 pixels.
The history doesn't keep EVERYTHING, but you can change your preferences in Photoshop to how much it will remember.
Now look back up. The first picture of Lina which says "25.jpg" next to it. This is the base. That will ALWAYS be there. That is the file as it looks when I open it. Hitting it at any time will reset me to the original image.
Now look back down! See those little button at the very very bottom, much like on the Action tab?
There are only three this time, and the Trash Bin does the same thing. However the other two are REALLY COOL.
Okay, first one, on the left, looks like a series of little boxes. This is the "Create duplicate state" icon which is fancy talk for "will open another image exactly like the one you're looking at". Basically if you want to edit and icon in multiple ways, and keep the histories for each? Hit this. You can make a dozen of them and edit them each a little differently.
Next to that is the Snapshot button. The Snapshot button is AWESOME.
What the Snapshot button does is takes a picture of your image and places it up there, above the actual 'History' stuff.
If you look up and see the two other Lina Images? Snapshot 1 and Snapshot 2? Even though those are small little icons, you can see that I've made some minor changes there. The joy of Snapshots is that if you're not sure which way something looks better, take a Snapshot of it both ways. Then by clicking those little avatars you can switch quickly between them to decide which you like more.
Be careful though. Snapshots do NOT maintain their own history. And if you switch between Snapshots too much, you will lose your overall history and not be able to go back any more.
AND THAT'S IT wow god my head hurts. Uh. Questions or comments? x.x
Oops: I spelled borders wrong! THROUGH THIS ENTIRE THING.
I've decided to write this for a couple of reasons, mostly because I thought it might be helpful, and partly because I'm bored.
So briefly, what this guide will cover:
--How to screencap anime or videos for icons.
--How to set up your workspace.
--How to crop, resize and sharpen icons.
--How to use levels to clean a manga icon.
--How to change the hues and levels in a colored icon.
--How to put boarders on icons.
--How to make an automated action.
--How to use automated actions on a batch of icons all at once.
--Random useful tips.
Please note that this guide only covers Photoshop. I do not have an upload of Photoshop for you guys, but I'm sure if you ask around you can find a hack somewhere. I suggest getting Photoshop CS or CS2 if at all possible. But Photoshop 8 is what I use, and as far as I know all versions function more or less the same.
Also, while this guide does not cover Paint Shop Pro, which is a decent photo imaging software, a lot of the details on how things work is more or less the same across the board. If you prefer to use Paint Shop Pro, this guide will probably still be able to help you with some minor translations.
Also note that I will be using a lot of screenshots, so under the cuts it might get a bit image intensive.
How to Screencap Videos-
For screencapping, BSplayer is my player of choice. You can get a download of it here.
I'm not going to go over, in detail, how it works, since I think we're all used to poking around these things.
Just go to preferences, which is the far right icon that looks like a hammer. From preferences click the YU2Y formats box. Under that you can select what directory you want your screencaps to go into. And under that you can select file format. I suggest jpeg.
Basically, all you have to do is hit "P" whenever you want to cap whatever is showing on the player. It will only cap what is playing in BSplayer (you can set it up to cap the entire computer screen if you want through). You can arrange things so different keys will do that though. I personally have it up so either space or double-click pause, and have my middle mouse button screencap.
Anyway, this way you can just watch through an entire episode while periodically capping stuff.
How to Set Up Your Workspace-
It sounds silly, but this is rather important. There are a lot of features with Photoshop, and what you need is very limited. It's also quite customizable, so you might as well use that to your advantage.
This is my layout.
See how in the bottom right box, the tabs Navigator, Info and Histogram are all in there? Typically History and Actions are also in the same box like that, however with simple click and drag you can separate them. I switch between History and Actions constantly, so I suggest giving them their own boxes.
Typically, these are the only windows you will need. If you're doing flashy pretty icons, you may need the Layers tab open, but since in CFUD we usually just use screencaps, I won't cover that.
To bring out these tabs go to Window on the top toolbar and make sure you have the same things as me checkmarked.
Actions, History, Navigator, Options and Tools. Tools is the vertical bar you see the left of the screen, and Options is the horizontal bar at the top which should be anchored there.
Options bears a bit of explanation. It's a versatile bar which changes depending on which tool you have selected. For example, in the screen cap of my layout, I have the Move Tool selected, and the Options bar is full of choices like "Auto Select Layer" or "Auto Select Groups", which only pertain to the Move Tool.
FOr the most part, you won't be using the Options bar. Mainly if you need to erase or draw on an icon, you'll find resizing and opacity variables for the brush or eraser up there. Also the Options bar has some useful abilities when using the Crop tool, which I'll explain later.
Another thing to point out is the background color for my canvas. The black area all around Ed there is the background. On default it is gray, which is probably what you see. But in the case of icons I find it more useful to make it all white or all black.
To change the background color go to the foreground color box on the Tool bar, in the image it's the bright pink box.
Double click the box and the Color Picker will appear. By adjusting the slidebars you can pick your color. Once you have the color you want hit Okay and close the window.
Now go to the Paint Bucket Tool on the Tool Bar and select it.
If you cannot find the Paint Bucket Tool, it may be under the Gradient Tool.
Right click the Gradient Tool and select the Paint Bucket Tool.
Now just hold down shift and left-click anywhere on the background.
And presto chango~
Incidentally, if you are the type to use Photoshop for other things, you can save multiple workspace arrangements so the right windows will automatically be there for whatever you want to do.
Just go to Window >> Workspace >> Save Workspace on the top tool bar.
Once you save the workspace, it will appear under Window >> Workspace. As you can see "Closed - Right" is a saved workspace of mine. You can click any of your options at any time to have the right windows appear in the right place.
And that's about it for setting up your workspace.
How to Crop, Resize and Sharpen Icons-
Okay, here are the most basics of iconning. Most of you probably already know cropping and resizing. So I will move through that quickly. I'll put more detail into sharpening though, since there seems to be a general lack of sharpening out there.
So here we have Sasuke looking bitchy as usual. And we want to icon him cause hay, he's still sexy.
Select the Crop Tool located on the Tool bar.
If you hold down Shift and left-click anywhere on the image, and then drag, you will create a perfect square with your Crop Tool. If you let go of shift, you can make any shape or size of rectangle you want. But since icons are ideally 100x100 pixels, I tend to habitually hold down shift.
There are several things to note about this image.
First of all, the part of the image you are cropping is obviously within the box, the darkened part is the "shield" and is what will disappear once you crop the image. If you look on the Option bar, you can change the shield to whatever color you want, you can also make the Opacity whatever percent you want.
You can grab and drag the edges of the cropping box to change the size of it. But if for some reason you don't want to crop after all, or you want to start over, look in the upper right color. The "NO" sign there will cancel your cropping selection. The checkmark next to that will okay it. If you don't cancel your crop or okay it, you won't be able to do much.
Once you have decided on the are you want to crop, either hit the checkmark or else double-click within the selected area.
Now that you have the area you want selected, it's time to think about sharpening.
There are basically two ways to get a clean icon.
You can either
-Crop
-Sharpen
-Resize
-Sharpen
or you can just
-Crop
-Resize
-Sharpen
It's not necessary to sharpen prior to resizing on many icons, and on others it's very useful. Because the base for this icon is large and not very detailed, sharpening it first isn't necessary. On an icon with more detail, sharpening prior to resizing will hel keep you from losing that detail when it's reduced to 100 pixels, and will help make the icon less mucky.
Nice it's not really necessary on this icon, we'll skip it.
To resize an image you want to go to Image >> Image Size on the top toolbar.
And up comes the Image Size window.
What you want to look at is the 'Pixel Dimensions' area. First of all, the chain image on the right should show that width and height are linked. If it doesn't look like this image, click that icon. This will make sure that the height and width stay relative to each other.
Also, you want to make sure the drop down bars say pixels. If it says percent, change it.
Now just enter 100 into width or height and hit okay.
You now have an image the size of an LJ icon.
Now, I know a lot of you would go "oh that's pretty" and hit save and upload it. DON'T DO THAT! If you do I will be sad. Unsharpened things are not pretty, they're hard to make out and they hurt my eyes.
So here is what you do.
Go up to Filter on the top toolbar, then down to Sharpen.
For now you want to pick the "Sharpen" option, but I'll explain briefly what all of these do.
Sharpen - Basically, it reads the colors of the pixels and makes the ones that are next to each other and of a similar color the same color. This is a good way to make a file smaller, as each image is composed of less information. It also makes things much easier on the eyes when in a small size like a 100 square pixel icon.
Sharpen Edges - Same thing as Sharpen, only more... selective? It basically tries to keep the area to hard edges in the picture only. I never use it as it's not actually that 'intelligent' and tends to look back.
Sharpen More - Roughly the same thing as hitting "Sharpen" twice. You'll only ever need this on VERY fuzzy images.
Unsharpen Mask - I will cover this in more detail later. It is basically Sharpen only you can precisely vary options, and subsequently group colors more, use less or more colors and make things more or less sharp.
Smart Sharpen - As far as I know, only Photoshop CS2 has this option. It's an addition to Unsharpen Mask, which allows you to vary the Opacity of the mask you're applying.
Anyway, select just regular old Sharpen.
And check out the difference.
Clear, right? Not as distracting either and is less work for the eyes. If you want to find out how to add a pretty boarder to this, keep going.
How to use Levels to Clean a Manga Icon-
Okay. MOST scanslated manga has always been cleaned by the time you get it. But assuming you are scanning your own stuff, or working from raw scans, the images you are working from won't be black and white so much as a whole lot of gray.
Here we have a nice gritty picture of Namine.
Note that it isn't icon size yet. You almost ALWAYS want to play with levels or any any variation options, on an image that hasn't been minimized. This is because things can be editted in much more detail if you have more detail to work with.
Now, first of all, note that she isn't ACTUALLY even in completely gray values. You'll be hard pressed to find any grayscale manga that are naturally gray when you scan them. If you are partial to completely desaturated icons, then go to Image on the top tool bar and down to Adjustments and then click Desaturate.
And what you get is this:
Not a huge difference, but it bleached out some of those blueish tones. I personally like having a bit of color in there, gives it more flavor. But up to you.
Now on to actual levels.
First of all, make sure you are on a RGB or CYMK color set up. RGB stands for Red Green Blue and basically means that every color you see is a mixture of a certain amount of Red, Greed and Blue. CYMK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and blacK and means the same thing as with RGB. CYMK will allow you to ultimately have a greater range of colors, but it also takes up a LOT more space (an icon left in CYMK mode and saved as *.jpg will push 700kb). Thus you want all icons saved as RGB or Grayscale. However, I personally like to put my icons to CYMK while I'm editing them, as you'll get greater effects.
Up to you what you wanna do. But go to Image at the top tool bar again. And this time go down to Mode, there you see all the options you have available to you.
Now, once you are on a channel which will allow you to play nicely with levels. Go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels... and you will get the following box.
This is your level adjustment box.
You can actually do a whole fucking lot with this box. I don't even know how much detail you can get into with it. So I'll just cover the most basic parts.
The "Channel" drop down menu at the top should be on RGB or CYMK, depending on which you're working with. This means it will effect all of those colors equally and at once.
Now, look at the graph I have here.
See the arrows under the box? There are three. One is black, one is gray and one is 'clear'. These represent at which point on the spectrum that black and white start, and how close to black or white the midtones are. It's hard to explain so you're better off just toying with it yourself, you'll get it.
Now see on the graph the large black spike toward the right? This means most of the pixels in the picture are toward the whiter end of the spectrum. Where I to inverse the Namine image, it would be more dark than light, and the graph would show a large spike on the left instead.
And do you see the way that the graph tapers toward the left? And how it doesn't even START until a good ways in? This not only shows us that the image doesn't have many dark colors, but that even the darker grays are still a far cry from being actually BLACK. Where there any true black in this image, the graph would show right over the black triangle.
Cleaning an image with levels is pretty simple. What you want to do is tell the image to shorten the spectrum of color available to it. Basically, by moving the black arrow toward the right, it will steadily make all the dark grays darker. By moving the white arrow to the left, it will make all the light grays lighter.
Now you can see for yourself. I moved the white arrow to the left, the black arrow to the right. Most of the lightest grays in the picture, which were making up the background of the image, have been turned white. Meanwhile the darker grays that made up the lineart have been darkened more. I also moved the gray arrow over to the right slightly. This means that more of the midtone grays would go darker instead of lighter, making the lineart look more solid.
Also, remember that channel bar from before?
Well, I'm too lazy to explain how it works in detail. But BASICALLY a channel is each color that goes into making a picture. In my case Red, Green or Blue. By hitting the drop down bar you can select one of these colors and adjust the Levels of just that one color.
It gets complicated because if you were to say, move the Black arrow over while on the Green channel, you wouldn't be making it a darker green. Black represents "lack off" so what you would get is less green, with more blue and red showing through. Play with it if you like. Similarly, moving the white arrow would amount to giving the image more green.
How to Change the Hues and Levels in a Colored Icon-
In the last section I covered Level's pretty well. So in this one I'm going to cover Hues and combine them with Levels a little bit. But if you want to see HOW I did what I did with Levels, you'll have to read back.
So here we have Lina with an awesome expression. Only... she's in the dark. She's also purple. Let me tell you. I learned a lot about hue since picking up Lina, who's always in weird lighting in the movies =\
First of all, let's take her out of the dark. If you want to, you can use Auto Levels, which is right under the usual Levels options:
Sometimes this works really well. In a situation where a character ISN'T in dramatic light like this, just in slightly too dark lighting, it will usually lighten and brighten things nicely. I will usually hit Auto Levels to see how it looks, and if I don't like it, just go back on my History tab.
But since here she's in lighting with a lot of contrast, the Auto Levels make her skin way too bright, and if I were to minimize it she would look like a shiny blob with hair. Purple hair.
I went into levels and manually lightened it just a bit. Enough so that the whites of her eyes were... more white, but not so much her skin started to glow. The icon will still have dramatic lighting, and still be a little on the dark side, but as long as you can see Lina's expression I can live with that.
Now what we need to do is play with the Hue. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Hue is... the color part of the color. When I say the word color you probably think of things like red and yellow etc. In fact, every color is made up of three components: Hue, Value and Saturation.
Hue is the most saturated and unadulterated version of any color. That is to say, the most red of red, the most blue of blues. The most lime green of lime's greens. What I mean is when you change JUST the Hue, you will not make a color darker, you will not make it lighter. You will not make it more or less saturated or 'gray'. You will only make it more red or more orange or more green or what-have-you.
That said. Go to Color Balance under Image >> Adjustments >> Color Balance. (Incidently, if you have the time, play around in the Adjustments menu. It is your god. You can do just about ANYTHING to an image by toying with those bad boys).
The Color Balance menu looks like this:
Okay, here is a brief lesson in color.
Red, Orange and Yellow are "warm" tones while Green, Blue and Purple are "Cool" tones. If you put warm tones and Cool tones together, they're going to gray each other. By gray I mean the colors won't be as vivid or saturated. If you put cool tones with cool tones they will saturate each other. Each color on the color wheel has an exact opposite. The 'opposite' of red, for example, is green. Opposite colors gray each other most specifically. So if you were to mix equal amounts of red with equal amounts of green and if they were both of exactly opposite hues while exactly the same saturation, you would get gray.
This is why Lina's hair is not at all saturated in this picture. The warm brown (which is a dark orange) has been overlaid with a dark violet.
Now people are almost always warm. In anime they might have blue hair, but skin tone is still warm. And I don't mean yellow. Skin isn't yellow. If your skin is yellow you are in desperate need to add some red hue.
Which brings me to where the Color Balance bars. Not now currently each "Color Level" is on zero. This is relative to the picture you are editing. It doesn't mean your picture has no red, it just means you haven't yet added any red.
Also note the three bars. Cyan - Red, Magenta - Green, Yellow - Blue. These are placed opposite each other because they are opposing on the color wheel.
For an extreme example, here is what happens if I move the arrow on the Cyan - Red bar to the left.
That's as much Cyan as I can get when the Color Balance set to midtones.
If I undo that and set it to Highlights instead, you can guess what happens.
Cyan only gets added to the brighter colors.
So what you need to do for this icon is take what you know about how it SHOULD look (brown hair, palely tanned skin) and how it DOES look (lavender skin, purple hair) and what you know about color to make it look right.
In this case, the picture is too cool. It's safe to say we need more of EVERY warm tone, so I'll adjust those.
Closer, but now it's too pink. Maybe the Magenta wasn't the kind warm we wanted.
And now that I think about it, using more Green instead of Magenta did a great job of canceling out a lot of the Magenta that was making up the purple. Also, though I don't snow it. I went through and put yellow and green into the shadows, and red and yellow into the highlights. With the exception of the highlight in her hair, which still has a slight purple cast to it, you can no longer tell Lina is sitting in a dark room lit only with purple light.
Now that that much is done, I apply an unsharpen mask (because I like them, most people wouldn't even notice the difference) and minimize and sharpen again... and then add another unsharpen mask cause it was still too fuzzy for my taste.
Here you can see the final product vs how it would have looked if it'd only played with the levels to brighten it up. Not the best icon in the world, no. But at least it isn't purple anymore.
Here are some more examples, just briefly, of the joys of using Levels. Games, I think, are most notorious for being too dark in places. These are some screencaps I have left over from making Riku's icons. The left size is the icon only resized and sharpened. The right side is with the addition of levels.
Notice how even when the icon wasn't originally that dark. Adjusting the levels does a lot for it.
How to Put Boarders on Icons-
This is BLISSFULLY SIMPLE after everything else I've written about.
Have open the icon you want to put a boarder on. Go to the top tool bar for Select >> All.
This selects the entire image. Now you want to go to Edit >> Stroke, again on the top tool bar.
That will bring up the stroke menu.
Basically, what stroke does is it 'strokes' within (or without) the selected line. It will follow that line with a depth of however many pixels you want, in whatever color you want.
The settings you see on my menu are the ones you typically want to use. Inside stroke, one pixel width with black. For my magic or alchemy icons I use a three inch white boarder. You can click the black box to select whatever color you want. Similarly, you can go down and fiddle with the blending and opacity if you want something more fancy.
Hit okay and save and you're all set.
How to Make an Automated Action.-
Okay, now that I've taught you how to do everything individually, I'm going to show you how to do it automatically.
That's right. Photoshop comes with a beautiful little feature called the automatic action, which will allow you to record a series of actions and then replay then on any image as many damn times as you want.
First, let's take a look at the Actions tab.
Above, you see my Actions Tab. Within the Icons folder there are several actions: RBG and Save is just what it sounds like. It will convert any image to RPG format, save it and close it. Save as Jpeg saves the open image as a Jpeg file, I made that back when I'd accidentally saved a whole lot of images as *.png on accident. Make png/rgb icon is my "make an icon" action, though the name no longer fits. That action converts to CYMK, uses a Unsharpen mask, resizes the icon to 100x100 pixels, uses Sharpen and converts back to RGB at which point I can decide if that was what I wanted or not. If it isn't what I wanted I will go into the History tab and back up, deciding at what point the process went off track and adjust the icon manually. Boarder makes a 1 pixel black boarder around the icon, saves it and closes it and White Boarder makes a 3 pixel white boarder around the icon.
As you can see, you can do virtually anything with an Action. Furthermore, you aren't required to make a completely new action if you just want to make minor changes.
Here I've opened up the Make png/rgb icon action. You can now see each step this action takes my image through and how it specifically remembers the settings on each step. Note how while it uses "Unsharpen Mask" twice, it uses different settings each time.
The cool thing is, you can edit this action any time you want to.
First. See how the checkmark across from Make png/rbg icon is red? That means that this action is not currently using all of it's steps. If you look down you'll I've unchecked the second Unsharpen Mask, because I don't always want it. If the step isn't checked, it will skip that step every time you play the action until you re-check it.
Furthermore, if you want to keep a step but change the details of it, just double click on that step. If, say, I wanted to have my second Unsharpen Mask set to sharpen to a radius of 8.0 pixels, all I have to do is double-click "Unsharpen Mask" and change the settings, then hit okay.
Pretty nice, hm? So here's how you make one.
Look at the very bottom of the Actions tab, see the button I've squared in red? This is probably the only one that bears explaining, but I'll say what they all do.
Square - first button - This is the "stop" button. You pretty much only use this to stop recording.
Circle - second button - Record. Once you hit this the program will 'record' any action you do. Not stuff like moving your mouse, but resizing, selecting, changing formats, even saving and closing it will record.
Triangle - third button - Play. You need to have an action selected (or a specific step within an action selected) to hit this button. When you do it will do all the recorded steps to the image you have open.
Folder - fourth button - New Folder button. Hit this to make a new folder you can put your actions in and group them as you like.
New Layer - fifth button - The one in the red square. This is the "New Recording" button. Hit this and you will get a box asking you what the name of your action is going to be, and what folder to put it in.
Trash bin - sixth button - You can drag any action, step or folder to the trash bin to delete it.
Anyway, hit the New Layer icon. The box that pops up is pretty straight-forward. Name your action, choose the set to put it in (this is the folder thing). You can key it an F-key if you think you'll use it a lot, and you can give it a color to help better organize if you like that kinda thing.
Once you hit okay your action immediately starts recording.
Now? Do whatever you want. I personally suggest you scroll back up and go through the steps to make a boarder action. Maybe you like doing the rest by hand. If you don't, I suggest making an icon button which will resize and sharpen your icons however you like them. Remember, you can always go back through the history tab step by step if you want to change something.
Once you've done everything you want to do, hit the stop button. And you're done! You can hit play whenever you want to use that action again.
How to Use an Automated Batch.-
Okay, the big one of all usefulness. "Aviy," you say. "This is all great," you say. "But," you say." "I'm not going back and doing all this shit to each one of my fucking five hundred icons one at a time," you say.
WELL that's all very reasonable. LUCKY FOR YOU there is the glorious batch automate option.
Exactly what it sounds like. You can make an Automated Action and then run that Action on every goddamn icon you have, all at once.
First off, go to File >> Automate >> Batch on the top tool bar.
Then you get the Batch Automate Window:
Under Set: you choose which folder the Action you want to use is.
Under Action: you choose which action you want to run.
Under Source: you choose where the files are coming from. Basically there is 'Folder' where you'll select the directory from your computer. 'Open Files' where it will run on all the files currently open in Photoshop, and 'File Browser' which... I don't know.
So assuming you're set to Folder, you click "Choose" to pick the directory. You can, if you like, include all sub folders, which is useful if you organize yours icons like I do.
"Suppress color Profile Warnings" -- sometimes when you open images you will get a "discard imbedded profile" query. THEOREHTICALLY this matters when you view an image, but I've personally never noticed it and I always discard them. If you don't discard them you'll have to go manually set your color mode to CYMK or RGB. Anyway, make sure you have that box clicked or else your Automate might get held up.
MY ONE BIG SUGGESTION HERE is that you make sure you have "Save" and "Close" in whatever action you run. Otherwise Photoshop will open up all of your 509 icons one after another, and will try it's fucking best to crash your computer.
Anyway, then you're all set! Hit okay and let her fly.
Random Useful Tips.-
Okay, I actually only have one useful tip for this section, but it's a doozy so here it goes.
Time to talk about the History tab, kids.
Okay, look UNDER The three pictures of Lina. See the list of actions? Open, CMYK Color, Unsharpen Mask etc? These are the actions I've done to this image. The most recent think I did was "Color Balance" which is why it's on the bottom of the list. If I were to click any one of those items though, my image would backtrack to that point. For example. HIt Image Size? We'd go back to just before I made my icon 100x100 pixels.
The history doesn't keep EVERYTHING, but you can change your preferences in Photoshop to how much it will remember.
Now look back up. The first picture of Lina which says "25.jpg" next to it. This is the base. That will ALWAYS be there. That is the file as it looks when I open it. Hitting it at any time will reset me to the original image.
Now look back down! See those little button at the very very bottom, much like on the Action tab?
There are only three this time, and the Trash Bin does the same thing. However the other two are REALLY COOL.
Okay, first one, on the left, looks like a series of little boxes. This is the "Create duplicate state" icon which is fancy talk for "will open another image exactly like the one you're looking at". Basically if you want to edit and icon in multiple ways, and keep the histories for each? Hit this. You can make a dozen of them and edit them each a little differently.
Next to that is the Snapshot button. The Snapshot button is AWESOME.
What the Snapshot button does is takes a picture of your image and places it up there, above the actual 'History' stuff.
If you look up and see the two other Lina Images? Snapshot 1 and Snapshot 2? Even though those are small little icons, you can see that I've made some minor changes there. The joy of Snapshots is that if you're not sure which way something looks better, take a Snapshot of it both ways. Then by clicking those little avatars you can switch quickly between them to decide which you like more.
Be careful though. Snapshots do NOT maintain their own history. And if you switch between Snapshots too much, you will lose your overall history and not be able to go back any more.
AND THAT'S IT wow god my head hurts. Uh. Questions or comments? x.x
Oops: I spelled borders wrong! THROUGH THIS ENTIRE THING.