Tutorial 3: A Tutorial for Yellow/Green Colouring
This tutorial was requested by likealight for Ask The Maker 4.0 who wanted to know how to achieve yellow/green colouring based on this icon. I think she probably gave up hope that I would ever get around to it. I AM SORRY. ;_;
I went through this phase where god almighty I was in love with saturated yellows and green. I fell off that wagon but now I think I am back on. Something about jaundiced looking skin really gets me hot and bothered. ;_;
Before I ramble on, I must state that I use Paint Shop Pro X. But the way I go about achieving this colouring should probably be translatable. At least I think it should be. And also, there was no rhyme or reason for doing this. I was just fiddling around, found something I liked and then proceeded to take it and beat it to the ground. Also, I tend to work on a 200 x 200 base before resiszing down cause I can see stuff properly when its 200 x 200 rather than 100 x 100.
I open up my screencap - taken from fishsticktheatre and do the basic prep which I do for all icons. Which takes us basically from;
This
to this
In case you wanted to know, this basic prep of mine consists of this. If you don’t, just SKIP right past this.
I duplicate my base thrice and each time I set it to Screen. I duplicate it a fourth time, but this time I set it to Softlight. The opacity for all of these is 100 %. After this, I pick a pale lemon yellow fill layer, which I set to Softlight at 100%. Then, I pick a B&W gradient, which I set to Softlight at 100%. To finish of the basic prep, I copy-merge the whole thing, paste is as a new layer and then adjust the Brightness/Contrast with Brightness at -27 and Contrast at 17. Of course these things aren’t set in stone and I fiddle with it from icon to icon, depending on what I feel looks nice.
Now for achieving the yellow green effect.
What I do is I pick a Neon Green fill layer. I don’t have any specific shade as such; I just go for the most cornea-searing one. ;) The colour I pick looks like this. SHIELD YO EYES.
Now set this layer to Burn. At 100% Burn, Britta is going to look like an alien. But we do not want that. We want a prettily coloured [ hey man, my opinion] rebel with a cause. So we decrease the opacity to 40%, enough to retain the green without looking like the cap binged on radioactive sludge.This is how the icon looks now:
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Next up, The Channel Mixer. Now, I sort of know how the Channel Mixer works but ask to me explain it and I would have lost you. But at least, in the case of achieving this Yellow/Green colouring, I understand that when I bump up the green tones before hand and then mess around with the Green Channel, somehow everything works. Sort of? I WARNED YOU ALL.
Let me have another go at. When I put this green layer before hand, it kind of allows me to bump up the pinks without messing with the green. Because normally, when you push the Green Channel to extremes in the Channel Mixer, you are going to get cornea-burning pink or over brightened green. But with the neon green fill layer beforehand, I can fiddle with the Red and Green bars without losing my shit.
Here is a screenshot of my Channel Mixer settings too.
Now, after the Channel Mixer business, this is how our icon looks like. While it may not look like it, we are pretty close now to our destination.
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At this point, while the colours and all are there, Britta still kind of looks sickly and depthless.
How do we fix that?
B&W GRADIENT TIME!
I think I mentioned this once in another tutorial but B&W gradients are really really useful. They add depth, they light up the icon and they create shadows and saturate of lighten colours deepening on the layer setting. They are seriously one of the best things EVER. So I add a B&W gradient and set it on Softlight. The resulting effect is this. However, we are still not where we want to be.
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So, what I do is copy-merge the whole thing, which is Ctrl+A, Ctrl +Shift+C and paste the whole thing as a new layer. And I blur the whole thing using Gaussian Blur, set to a radius of 9. I don’t know why I set the radius so high but I just do. Now our icon looks more like the end product.
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I however am still not happy. Therefore one more B&W gradient layer set to Softlight at 100% opacity. Now that’s more like it. I know it seems invisible to everyone else and even to me but at that time, I wanted one more gradient layer and therefore I put it. :D
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BUT, GODDAMN pixels. I can see them. So I copy-merge the icon and paste it as a new layer and use a noise removal function in PSP known as One-Step Noise Removal. In Photoshop you could use the Reduce Noise filter I think to achieve the same results with the added function of deciding the extent to which you want to remove the noise.
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Now, yes, IT IS DONE. I resize it to 100x100 and boom, finished. I chose not to Sharpen it here cause I kind of like the blurriness but yeah, sharpening is your call. :)
End Result:
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Other icons obtained by the same method:
Other icons that went horrifically wrong because of this method. :D
The End.
I hope this was somewhat understandable and I am always open to questions and comments!