Tutorial #4
requested by reebeecaa
step one: cropping and prepping the base First, I crop the cap. When you have a road or path in your image, it's nice to include the end of the road as seen in the cap. It gives a sense that the character is going somewhere (or has been somewhere if the figure is facing the other direction.) Also, the natural shape of the road frames the character and it's always nice to use elements naturally in the cap to frame the subject.
It's a dark cap so I brighten it a lot using a curves adjustment layer. I grabbed the middle of the RGB line and pull it up and to the left. (The dot is at Output: 183, Input: 74.) Then I stamp the icon into a new layer and set that to Soft Light, 100%.
step two: inverting the image I invert the image by using a gradient map adjustment layer. The first color is #FFFFFF at the location 0% and the second is #0a0d0f at the location 72%. It looks like this:
step three: some texture I add a texture by fuuurs and set it to subtract, duplicate that layer and rotate it 180° still set to subtract. Then I used a gradient map adjustment layer with the default Black, White gradient to make the icon b&w.
step four: duplicating the image I stamped the icon into a new layer and duplicated it twice. On the first duplicated layer, I moved the image to the left so the figure was duplicated and set it to Screen 70%. Then I erased the parts of the layer I didn't want. On the second duplicated layer, I moved the image to the right set it to Screen 70% and repeated the erasing from the previous layer.
step five: final steps Last, I sharpened the icon and then blurred the spots that were too sharp.