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Using simple color layers.
Written in GIMP, but translatable across the board.
I was asked by xbellaxdivax about the icon coloring in my recent batch of Heroes icons, so here is a little walk through regarding said icons :] I went through an icon making lapse for a long while, and my last batch was a sort of "starting over" in icon making. As such, these icons were pretty simply made. And by simple, I mean with use of the magic of color layers :o [Remember those?]
Now, with a show like Heroes, there are plenty of sources on the web to work with, but the problem isn't where to find shots - it's how to work with images that are heavily saturated with a certain color or group of colors. This isn't a ground-breaking tutorial by any means, since plenty of people have written some fantastic tutorials regarding color correction, but this is just my way of going about it :]
First of all, I do what I like to call "color analyzing" - which is a long title for something so simple. Basically, I take a screen cap or image, and figure out what the dominant color in it is. For example:
This particular image is heavily saturated with blues.
Figuring out the dominant color is helpful, as it allows you to choose other color layers to brighten and enhance what's otherwise muted. Again, something that seems simple, but is useful for icon makers who are willing to spend a little more time experimenting and finding colors that work well without becoming too bright or radioactive. Now, for the sake of brevity (haha, I think we're past the point of brevity, right?), I've cropped and re-sized a base from the image above to work with:
With the base ready, it's time to actually do some layer work. Because this image is so dark, I duplicate the base layer and set it to screen. As you can see, it lightens the image significantly, but doesn't add any extra color:
Next, we start to add a little color. I like to start with a reddish or brown color as the underlying base color, with will give a nice hue to skin without being too bright or too heavy. I like to use light, pale colors as opposed to the deep primary colors you might find in a pack of crayons. This is due to the differences you find with dark shades vs. light shades, which I'll provide examples for in the next step. For this particular icon, I started with a new layer of a pale, lighter brown (#80593c) and set it to overlay:
You can see that there's a little boost to the red and brown colors in the photo after one layer, and it's still a relatively bright icon thus far. As much as I like the subtle coloring, I felt it necessary to duplicate that layer, setting it to overlay as well:
This will make it darker, but will later allow you to build more and brighter colors on top of it without washing out the icon.Now that was a lighter shade of brown, but how about a darker shade of brown closer to that you'd find in a crayon box?
As you can see, the color in this icon is darker and much more dull, without lending any extra red tints to the skin or background. As for using pinks or reds to enhance skin tone?
The pink is not bad, but as you can see, it has lightened the icon significantly and won't really let you build on it. I'm a fan of building, as you all can see :] Now that we've got a nice base color, it's time to build & balance out the colors. For this, I created a new layer and filled it with a pale green (#aaae70), set to overlay, 100% opacity:
It's balanced it out a bit, but it's still too dark for my tastes, so I simply duplicated the overlay layer:
I'm a bit finicky when it comes to final results, and the intensity of the brownish red in the background I found a mite distracting, so I lowered the opacity of one brown overlay layer to 70%, and found that I liked the result:
A little sharpening later, we come to the end of our icon:
Phew! Such a novel for something so simple! This process can easily be applied to any image you can find by altering the color layers used, or adding more color layers. One-size won't always fit with all icons or images, so experimentation is key. This may seem like a catch-all phrase with icon-making or tutorial writing, but guides and walk throughs can only do so much... well.. guiding! I hope this helps! :]