Tutorial - Jack Shephard
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- Made in Photoshop 7, but fully translatable. No Selective Colouring.
- Requires knowledge of adjustment layers. (Lots of Colour Balance)
- Image-heavy and ridiculously long. My goal was to teach, not to give you guys a laundry list of numbers that you can plug in. Willingness to experiment is key!
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(Divided into six sections, just so it's a little less overwhelming)
Section 1: The Basics
Start by cropping your picture. I've chosen to do a centre crop because I love them. (Also, I already kind of have an idea in my mind about what this icon will look like - where the light is, where I want to draw the eye, so that's another reason I've chosen the crop that I did):
The cap is dark-ish, so the first thing I'm going to do is lighten it. I'm going to use a Curves adjustment layer, but you can use a Screen layer, Levels, a Curves layer set to Screen...whatever you're most comfortable with. Obviously, your settings will depend on your picture. My pic is only moderately dark, so it doesn't need too much brightening. Here's my Curve:
And the result is this:
Now it's really flat looking, and while that look can often work, I want this icon to have more contrast. My favourite method of getting contrast is to make a new Curves layer, not change any of the settings, and set it to Soft Light, so that's what I'm gonna do. That's the equivalent of merging all, duplicating, and setting to Soft Light. I prefer this method to the merging/duplicating/Soft Light method or the Copy-Merge/Soft Light method because this way, any changes I make to my base will be carried through to the Soft Light layer. Like if I intensified the Brightness of my first Curves layer (the one that brightened the base) then this Soft Light layer (aka, the contrast) will be affected as well. Or you can just chalk it up to my strange, strange ways. Anyway, here's the newly contrasted result - much better:
With most of my icons, that would be the stage where I'd start to fiddle with colours - maybe instead of leaving the Curves completely alone, I'd bend the Red curve a bit. But not here. I like the natural colours in this base... But maybe a bit more contrast would help? I duplicated my Soft Light Curves layer, and reduced the Opacity on the duplicate to 40%.
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Section 2: The Colouring
So now we have all this beautiful contrast! But with contrast comes intensified colours. Normally awesome, but now I'm really, really noticing that the hills behind Jack? They're blue. Looks cool, but I don't want them blue in my icon. I'm going to add a Colour Balance adjustment layer. Here are my settings:
Midtones
+100, +65, -52
This adds Red and Green, and takes away Blue - exactly what I want. Play around with it. You could delve into Shadows and Midtones if you want, but I'm really just trying to adjust the colouring as a whole - I'm not being nitpicky just yet.
The numbers you use depend on your cap, obviously. This step might not even be necessary. Or maybe your original cap is too yellow - in which case you'd be adding blue, not taking it away. Anyway, here's my result:
You know what, though? I didn't want to change the colour of Jack. I was happy with the colour he was before. I just wanted to change the colour of the background. So I used a soft eraser on the adjustment layer, erasing the colour from Jack, and a bit from the hills as well.
Here's what my layer mask looked like (black is where I erased, white is where I kept it) :
And here's the result:
Now the greenish colouring is more just in the far background. I've left a bigger range of colours in the hills in the foreground; that's because I want the background to end up colourful. I've decided to make the green even subtler by lowering the opacity of the Colour Balance layer to 50%
Now it's natural looking. Maybe too natural. I duplicated the Colour Balance layer and changed it to Soft Light, 90% Opacity.
The Soft Light adds contrast and fact that I'm using the Colour Balance layer again will intensify the green.
Now, though...the greens in the background are really bright. Much brighter than Jack. Instead of making the background duller, I'm going to make Jack brighter. I made a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and increased the Saturation to +27.
Then I erased the Saturation layer (using a soft eraser) from the super-bright greens in the background.
Now I have a bright Jack and an equally bright background. Yay! Here's where I go crazy.
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Section 3: Playing With Light.
The first thing I'm going to do is to brighten the background on Jack's left and right. The background is kind of the same Luminosity as Jack right now, and I'd rather Jack stood out a bit more. So I painted around the edges with a soft white brush (on a new layer of course - always on a new layer)
Then I set that layer to Soft Light, 60% Opacity
This lightens the area to the left and right of Jack. However, now those areas are a light, not very contrasted green, and I want more contrast and more red in the hills. So I made a new Colour Balance adjustment layer with the following settings:
Midtones
+100, 0, 0
...and set it to Soft Light. This adds red and adds contrast at the same time (the one part in this tutorial where I do things efficiently...)
But I didn't want the contrast and red to be on Jack - just in the background. So I erased the layer wherever I didn't like it (mostly just all over Jack). And here's how it turned out.
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To me, Jack's pretty purple shirt is coming across as dark and flat. I want to brighten it at the bottom to add a bit more depth. I'm choosing to do so using a light texture by lovelamp - here's the original texture, and here's where you download the set. For my purposes, I stretched it out like so...
...and set it to Screen. So:
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See how it brightened up the bottom of Jack's shirt, but is still super subtle? Soft around the edges...if you didn't know it was there, you might not realize I'd used a light texture at all. I love this texture.
Next I added another light texture (I can't remember who made it, sorry! I can't find it in any of my texture folders. Let me know if you know who made it, okay?) Anyway, I added the blue light texture to the top of the icon, and set it to Screen.
The effect is subtle, but you can hopefully see that it lightened the top of the icon a bit, and also subtlety effected the colours.
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Next, I added this texture (again, don't know who made it - let me know, please!).
I set it to Soft Light, 60% Opacity. This adds some more nice, brown colours into the background, and also darkens the background just a little bit:
However, it also darkens and adds brown to Jack, and I'd rather keep him brighter from the moment. So I erased the texture where it covered him (using a layer mask). You can see my erasing (black=erased, white=still there):
It's not an exact science. I didn't like the way the texture effected Jack's skin tone, so I erased it there. It's all about getting the effect that you want where you want it - at least, that's what it's about for me :) Result:
Is the top of the hill looking a bit dark to you guys? I thought it was a bit dark. So I added that same lovelamp texture that I used before, stretched in a different way this time:
...and set it to Screen
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Okay! That's it for light textures, at least for now. After all those light textures I added, here's the difference:
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The change is subtle, but it's brighter, the colours are crisper, and it's just...prettier, I guess. At least in my opinion :)
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Section 4: A bit more colour...
I want more contrast in Jack, but I don't want to change his Saturation. This is a dilemma - Soft Light would increase the contrast, yes, but it would also change the Saturation. So what I'm going to do is use Soft Light, but with less Saturation.
And what does that even mean? Weeell, it means that I made a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and decreased the Saturation to -66.
Then I erased that layer from everywhere but Jack (because Jack's the only part where I want to add contrast)
(Your erasing doesn't have to be perfect, obviously... xD)
And finally, I set this newly erased layer to Soft Light, 30%
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See? More contrast in Jack, without increasing his Saturation! (And the joy of using an adjustment layer is that, if you found that the layer dropped his Saturation too much, or that it still increased, you could just go back and change it until you were happy)
I wanted Jack to be a bit more yellow, so I made a new Color Balance layer:
Midtones
+29, 0, -40
But I was happier with a wider range of colours in the background, so I erased the Colour Balance layer from the background.
Starting to see a pattern with my colouring? Erased Colour Balance layers are probably what I use most often - I really like being able to adjust the colours in different areas separately.
Now...I want Jack's shirt to be a bit brighter. So I made another Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and increased the Saturation to +46
Not pretty. But then I erased the adjustment layer, everywhere but Jack's shirt.
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Ah! Pretty!
And then I duplicated that layer, to make his shirt even brighter.
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Section 5: Playing With Light, again
I think Jack is blending into the background a bit too much. I want him to stand out more. So I added this texture (maker unknown, sorry!):
...and set it to Soft Light, 50% Opacity.
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See the difference? (...no?) Jack's a tiny bit darker, and the background is a tiny bit lighter. It's especially noticeable in the upper-right corner.
Okay, now, looking at the icon again, my eye is drawn to the shadow on Jack's shirt, and I'm seeing a bit of a line there (due mostly to the light texture I put there. I drew it in with lines, just so you could see what I'm talking about).
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I wanted to emphasise that line a bit. So on a new layer, I painted with a soft black paintbrush, along the line:
...and then set that layer to Soft Light, 50% Opacity.
It just draws the eye along that line a bit more.
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Section 6: Finishing Touches
Jack's a bit blurry, isn't he? Gonna fix that. First, I made a new layer, and copy-merged (Ctrl-Shift-Alt-E). I don't know if they have that in PSP - you guys could just merge all and duplicate if you want :) Anyway, on this new, Copy-Merged layer, I'm going to remedy Jack's blurriness with good ol' Filter>>Sharpen.
Aw, but now he's over-sharpened. So I erased that layer (with a soft eraser, with varying degrees of Opacity, on a layer mask) until it was sharp in the places that I wanted, and less sharp in other places. Here's my layer mask:
White is where the Sharpened layer is there 100%, black is where I've erased it all together, grey is where I've erased it with my eraser at 50% Opacity. And here's the result:
Okay! We're almost done! A few more things - see how the top part of the gun kind of blends into the background? I want the distinction to be a bit more clear, so I'm going to add a bit more light around the top of the gun. I painted on a new layer with a soft white brush...
...and set to Soft Light.
The gun stands out just a bit more. Next I want a bit more red in the hill directly above Jack's head. So I made a Colour Balance layer with the following settings:
Midtones
+100, 0, 0
Highlights
0, +37, +33
Shadows
-2, -24, -21
These settings make the red more distinctive in the Shadows and Midtones, but take away red in the Highlights, so it's not pure red. It's more natural looking :)
I then erased that layer from Jack's face and arms, and from part of the background. I lowered the Opacity to 30%, just so it's a bit less extreme.
Last thing. I made a new layer, flood-filled it with white, left it on Normal, and decreased the Opacity to 1%. This stops the blacks from being pure black. It's just a bit softer looking.
And we're done! So that's my process, guys! Hope you found this at least slightly helpful; maybe I've encouraged you to experiment a bit? Let me know in the comments :)
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