Texture Tutorial
Program: CS2
Translatable: Most of it, yeah.
Image Heavy: Yes
Difficulty: I'd say intermediate. You should know how to color an image on your own. For everything else there's lots of pictures.
Note: I'm hoping this tutorial will help people out who want to make their own texture heavy icons. Don't know if I succeeded. But that was the goal.
I was asked by library_of_sex how to make this icon.
For the sake of not driving myself crazy and not mucking the page up with a bunch of basic stuff we should all know I’m not going to explain the base coloring in detail. It’s a texture heavy icon and what this tutorial will concentrate on is technique (hopefully). For example instead of telling you in detail how I adjusted the lightness with Curves I will just say ‘I lightened up the base using Curves’. Easy enough. For that reason this is probably at least an intermediate tutorial, though if you have any questions I will try to help.
Okay!
I choose my screencap (Laura Roslin and Bill Adama from Battlestar Galactica), made my crop, colored the cap, and fixed the top/background up.
Okay, so I’ve gotten to this point in the coloring (second picture below) when I decide it’s totally not working for me as a simple icon. When I’m making icons I like to keep detail in the darker parts of the icon until the very end. In other words I don’t mess with the contrast so that the darker parts (in this case the Laura’s jacket, Bill’s jacket and the parts of their hair the light isn’t hitting) don’t end up black and lose the subtle details in there. If you look closely at Laura’s jacket you can see the outline of the shoulder.
Before starting the texture part of the icon I’m going to bring out those details even more. I make a Solid Color layer with a dark red color and set it to Screen at 27%. I then take Selective Coloring and fiddle with the Neutrals (-13, -13, 6, 0) to bring out even more detail.
The Texture Part
I’m going to use this texture on the right by cielo_gris that I modified from the one on the left.
First I drag it onto my icon. I’m going to make further modifications to the texture so I make a copy and put it aside for later.
With the texture selected I go to Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer. I check the monochrome box in bottom left corner and change the settings (0, 0, 130). I click okay and set the texture to Lighten.
I then take the copy I made earlier and set it to Softlight.
I duplicate this layer and set it to Overlay at 39%.
This is what my layers look like now;
I’m endanger of losing Laura’s face to the background so I darken the image a little with Curves.
Just a warning on this next step; I am not entirely sure what my thought process was when I did this. It worked out fine I’m just not sure how I decided this was something I should do.
I make another copy of the texture I've been using and bring it to the top. I flip it vertically (Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical) and then darken the hell out of it with Curves.
I then set this layer to Screen at 53%.
My layers now look like this;
I add a Photo Filter layer and select Yellow at 49% density. This isn’t a crucial step or anything so don’t worry if your program doesn’t have it. I’ve only been using Photo Filters for a few months so I don’t know enough about them yet to recommend them over other coloring methods.
sorry about the typo >_> That's suppose to say Photo Filter
Though, as you can see the picture on the right has a more even yellow color (If yellow is your thing, which apparently it is mine).
And finally we come to the Fun Part.
Unfortunately also known as The Part That Gets Tricky to Explain. We’ll see how I do with this.
What I’m going to do is put Bill and Laura back to back. The problem is there’s a little red at Laura’s back because of the last texture and I want Bill to have that too. So. I create a merged copy of the icon (crtl+alt+shift+e) and set it aside for now (click the little eye next to the layer and it’ll disappear from your workspace).
I select the last texture I used and flip it horizontally (Edit>Transform>Flip Horizonal).
The picture on the left is what I’m looking at now so I move the texture until I get the image on the right. I create a merged copy (crtl+alt+shift+e) and flip the image horizontally. Then I line Bill and Laura up so they’re back to back and then I scale them both down and smudge the tops of both images so I won't have a blank space at the top of the icon.
New texture!
Gonna use this one up there by iqons. I set it to Vivid Light and move it around on the canvas until it looks good.
It’s wicked dark however so I’m going to edit the texture again. Except this time I’m not confident about getting it right the first time so I’m going to make a Curves clipping mask. To do this make a Curves layer, don’t change anything yet, and click OK. With this layer selected type ctrl+alt+g. The Curves layer now should be connected to the texture layer below it (and the Curves will only affect this layer). If your program doesn’t support this it’s no biggie. Just edit the texture through Image>Adjustments>Curves like normal. I fiddle with Curves until the image is light enough for me.
This is where my preoccupation with preserving details from earlier pays off. Even though the icon is really dark you can still see details in Bill and Laura's hair and clothing.
The last few steps get very detail heavy so I'm going to let the pictures take over. If you have any questions about these please ask. It's the first time I've tried doing something like this.
note: I make a merged copy (ctrl+alt+shift+e) of the icon and the next few steps will use that layer.
Last notes; I never make texture heavy icons the same way twice. And I never go into them knowing exactly how it's going to work out. I try out lots of textures (and pretty much every blending mode) until I find something that look fun. If you're trying out textures and the blend modes are making your icon look either way too dark or way too light try cutting the opacity of the texture by 50% or 20% and try them all again.
I hope this helps in some way. Thanks for reading!
Originally posted at my icon journal.