Layer guide for more complicated icons and even your basic, standardized dying.
So, I told Box I'd show her how I did layers. This basically is now a quick and dirty guide to layer spiffiness!
THIS IS SO IMAGE HEAVY IT ISN'T FUNNY.
For a lot of the basics, I'm going to refer people to this guide here for Aviy's sexy, sexy iconning guide, and these guides here, for basic cleaning and redrawing. Redrawing and that fun stuff would make this post so much more hugetastic than it already is going to be.
First off, the very basics, what layers are. First you have your background, which is like an original drawing. And a layer is a sheet of transparency put on top of it. You can paint on the transparency without ever altering the original. Which is great if you decide you don't like a change. TOSS THE SHEET OUT. Your drawing is fine. Each new layer is a new sheet on top of that.
SO.
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, I start with Akito. Who is, by far, my most complicated icon set.
So, I want to start out with this.
And get to this:
So, lets get started, fire up photoshop and get the file loaded.
So, what we have here.
1. The image you're going to be playing with until you like it!
2. This is my template file. I always make one and save it somewhere I can both find it, and wont accidentally delete it. After you've finally found that color combination you like. MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THIS. This will save you a lot of crying. Yes, yes, you just made 300 icons and will never want another one NOW. But that's like saying you're never going to app again. We all know it's going to happen. This handy little file will make sure that the colors that you use will ALWAYS be uniform and your icons will ALWAYS match.
3. Your color bar.
4. Layers tab. Learn it and love it. On this handy little tab, you can change opacity, style of layer, duplicate a layer, delete a layer, make a layer invisible, change its position, and most importantly, this tab controls which layer you happen to be editing.
5. History tab. This is your oops bar! Any time you mess up with something and want a quick erase, click on the action above the one you didn't like! VIOLA! You are restored to the last action. Like an advanced Undo feature, it's love when you've just spend half an hour on an icon and your mouse decides to FREAK OUT ACROSS THE PAGE.
6. Magic lasso tool! A versatile little tool which will create a selection of any solid shape you click it on. Not the most smart about it, but it's really useful for what we're doing.
7. Brush tool! Standard drawing tool, best for detail work and huge expanses.
8. Bucket tool! Fills the entire field with a solid color.
There's also a little icon that looks like an eyedropper below the bucket tool that I forgot to number, that's the sampling tool. That picks up the color of anything you click it on. ALSO very useful.
Thar's everything I'll be referring to!
SO! Lets get started.
Go to image, and click image size. Get your image down to icon size. I find that dropping the image size down 50 pixels a time keeps the details a little smoother.
EDIT: Zelion just gave me an awesome alternate technique for sizing down that looks to save a lot of time. I'll be playing around with this in the future! Please take a look here!
So now we start what I'm really here for, layers! Click layers, new, and Layer.
A box will pop up with several options. A lot of these, frankly, I don't use. What we have here are:
Overlay: A nice strong layer, best for colorizing work and bolder colors. Also a nice layer for darkening in selections.
Soft light: A more muted layer, most colors you pour in are going to have a softer tone, and lighten lines.
Hard light: Opposite, naturally of soft light.
Vivid light: A really bright layer, good for highlights and things you want to stand out.
Because this is Akito, I'm choosing Soft Light. It's just the layer style that works best with the colors I use. Experiment and find what works on yours!
This box also has an option to set opacity or how dark the layer is going to be, we'll get back to that.
So, I use the eyedropper/sample tool, go over to my color template and pick up the gold on the far right. Swap over to the bucket tool and fill in the field.
Take a look at it and decide, aw hell, that's waaaayyy too eyeblinding bright. Find another color? NO!
Over to the layers tab! Clicking on the right hand box, is Opacity. Here I can make this layer of gold more transparent. For Akito, the standard is 70% sometimes a hair more or less, depending on how dark or light the original scan is. This is great for muting down really vivid colors. ALSO, if you notice, just to the left of that, you can change the style of the layer. Like the color, but wonder how it would look under Overlay? It's a click away, instead of deleting and creating a new layer.
So now I have a nice background color, but what about the eyes?
I create a new layer, and this time I pick Overlay, because I want a bit of a stronger color. I go up to my template and use the sample tool to get my blue, and come back with the brush tool. Detail work like this is easiest at about 400% zoom. Just click the little magnifying glass icon on it a couple of times to get there.
Color in the area you want! Now, it looks a little green. But this can be fixed!
Get your magic lasso tool and click on the eye.
The nice thing about selecting work areas is that your tools and commands will now only effect the area that's been circled. It doesn't matter what you draw or click outside of it.
The selection is a little too big for my preferences (see how it overlaps the outline of the iris out there?), so lets contract the selection a little.
Go to Select, modify and contract. 1 pixel is enough for what I need!
Now, I have the area I want, and I want to get rid of the color behind it. So I don't want to actually affect THIS layer, but a layer BELOW it. So I go over to the layer tab there, and I click on the one I want. In this case. I'm working on 1. I want to get rid of a bit of yellow in layer 2. So I click to highlight that layer.
Follow the prompts to get to desaturate, and VOOSH, the gold in JUST that circle is gone and turned into a nice neutral gray. It gives me a nice dull blue, but I want something a little brighter, so let me get a new layer on top of that.
Vivid light this time!
Remember what I said about selections? I can only draw in that area that's selected. That works no matter what layer I'm on. And it's really handy for things like highlights around boarders like this. I draw a nice little comma shape of brighter blue to give his eyes two shades.
And I'm done! Toss on some borders however you like to do that, and you're ready to save! In photoshop it's save for web and in image ready, it's save optimized.
For those of you editing jpg and gif files, that's it! SAVE AS YOU LIKE.
For those of you editing png. Hang on. Most scanlators use png files because of a nice, sharp look to the saves. The bad part is when you save to a png file, you lose the layers that were on top of it. Which means all that coloring work you did, the borders, everything, is lost.
We can prevent that.
Go here! And Flatten the image. This takes all those layers and turns it into one.
Like this! As you can see, all the layers are gone. You have just one background image. It's the original drawing. Now, go back to the previous step and save. Your work is safe!
The end result again is here!
EDIT: Suelo informs me that using save as instead of save for web will cause automatic flattening. Give it a try!
Most icons don't require this amount of work, but by using Akito's icons, that pretty much gives you a run down of just about anything you could commonly encounter prettying up your icons.
To give you an easier example, here's what I do with Agito's icons.
Here I am again with my basic icon, sized down where I like it and my color template.
This time I pick Overlay as my base, because Agito needs a stronger color.
First! I use the bucket tool and fill with blue, then use the sample tool and get some gold.
I zoom in pretty far, and caaareeefully color in my gold. No additional layers needed because overlay is already strong enough that I don't need to amplify it any further.
Borders and save!
THIS IS WHY I HAVE A LOT MORE AGITO ICONS. Because he's less of a bitch than Akito.
BUT THIS IS NOT ALL THAT YOU CAN DO WITH LAYERS. Oh no!
Suppose, if you will, I had this badass image of badassery. And I wanted to see what I could do with it. Naturally, I use a nice strong Overlay layer, and fill it with Agito's blue.
But that's not strong enough, so lets DUPLICATE the layer.
Now it's a rather eyecatching bright blue!
Except I think that's lame. So lets just toss this layer right now. Right click on that layer in our handy layers tab. All that blue gone!
Lets say the image was too light. I put another layer in... soft light this time. Fill it with black. But it's too dark, so I go lighten it until it looks darker, striking, but not overwhelming. Sleek!
Except nah, that's not what I want to do. Lets colorize!
But now I decide that Kazu stands out too much. Lets color him in with white. He's lightened now, and as a comic effect, looks shocked, washed out. Less a part of the action going on.
But that's not enough, lets make those flames a little brighter. They don't look quite right blue. A little coloring hereeee.
Well, you get the point. The point IS, play around, you know all the options now, and you can color over, fill over, and redraw until you get it the way you want. And with the layers, you don't have to worry about it messing up the lines below!
And I'm spent.
EDIT: Scintilla offers a free alternative to photoshop here! Which should be quite similar. (I know it's a favored tool, and recommended in video editing lists.) I haven't played around in it yet, but the suggestion is there for those who might be interested!
THIS IS SO IMAGE HEAVY IT ISN'T FUNNY.
For a lot of the basics, I'm going to refer people to this guide here for Aviy's sexy, sexy iconning guide, and these guides here, for basic cleaning and redrawing. Redrawing and that fun stuff would make this post so much more hugetastic than it already is going to be.
First off, the very basics, what layers are. First you have your background, which is like an original drawing. And a layer is a sheet of transparency put on top of it. You can paint on the transparency without ever altering the original. Which is great if you decide you don't like a change. TOSS THE SHEET OUT. Your drawing is fine. Each new layer is a new sheet on top of that.
SO.
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, I start with Akito. Who is, by far, my most complicated icon set.
So, I want to start out with this.
And get to this:
So, lets get started, fire up photoshop and get the file loaded.
So, what we have here.
1. The image you're going to be playing with until you like it!
2. This is my template file. I always make one and save it somewhere I can both find it, and wont accidentally delete it. After you've finally found that color combination you like. MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THIS. This will save you a lot of crying. Yes, yes, you just made 300 icons and will never want another one NOW. But that's like saying you're never going to app again. We all know it's going to happen. This handy little file will make sure that the colors that you use will ALWAYS be uniform and your icons will ALWAYS match.
3. Your color bar.
4. Layers tab. Learn it and love it. On this handy little tab, you can change opacity, style of layer, duplicate a layer, delete a layer, make a layer invisible, change its position, and most importantly, this tab controls which layer you happen to be editing.
5. History tab. This is your oops bar! Any time you mess up with something and want a quick erase, click on the action above the one you didn't like! VIOLA! You are restored to the last action. Like an advanced Undo feature, it's love when you've just spend half an hour on an icon and your mouse decides to FREAK OUT ACROSS THE PAGE.
6. Magic lasso tool! A versatile little tool which will create a selection of any solid shape you click it on. Not the most smart about it, but it's really useful for what we're doing.
7. Brush tool! Standard drawing tool, best for detail work and huge expanses.
8. Bucket tool! Fills the entire field with a solid color.
There's also a little icon that looks like an eyedropper below the bucket tool that I forgot to number, that's the sampling tool. That picks up the color of anything you click it on. ALSO very useful.
Thar's everything I'll be referring to!
SO! Lets get started.
Go to image, and click image size. Get your image down to icon size. I find that dropping the image size down 50 pixels a time keeps the details a little smoother.
EDIT: Zelion just gave me an awesome alternate technique for sizing down that looks to save a lot of time. I'll be playing around with this in the future! Please take a look here!
So now we start what I'm really here for, layers! Click layers, new, and Layer.
A box will pop up with several options. A lot of these, frankly, I don't use. What we have here are:
Overlay: A nice strong layer, best for colorizing work and bolder colors. Also a nice layer for darkening in selections.
Soft light: A more muted layer, most colors you pour in are going to have a softer tone, and lighten lines.
Hard light: Opposite, naturally of soft light.
Vivid light: A really bright layer, good for highlights and things you want to stand out.
Because this is Akito, I'm choosing Soft Light. It's just the layer style that works best with the colors I use. Experiment and find what works on yours!
This box also has an option to set opacity or how dark the layer is going to be, we'll get back to that.
So, I use the eyedropper/sample tool, go over to my color template and pick up the gold on the far right. Swap over to the bucket tool and fill in the field.
Take a look at it and decide, aw hell, that's waaaayyy too eyeblinding bright. Find another color? NO!
Over to the layers tab! Clicking on the right hand box, is Opacity. Here I can make this layer of gold more transparent. For Akito, the standard is 70% sometimes a hair more or less, depending on how dark or light the original scan is. This is great for muting down really vivid colors. ALSO, if you notice, just to the left of that, you can change the style of the layer. Like the color, but wonder how it would look under Overlay? It's a click away, instead of deleting and creating a new layer.
So now I have a nice background color, but what about the eyes?
I create a new layer, and this time I pick Overlay, because I want a bit of a stronger color. I go up to my template and use the sample tool to get my blue, and come back with the brush tool. Detail work like this is easiest at about 400% zoom. Just click the little magnifying glass icon on it a couple of times to get there.
Color in the area you want! Now, it looks a little green. But this can be fixed!
Get your magic lasso tool and click on the eye.
The nice thing about selecting work areas is that your tools and commands will now only effect the area that's been circled. It doesn't matter what you draw or click outside of it.
The selection is a little too big for my preferences (see how it overlaps the outline of the iris out there?), so lets contract the selection a little.
Go to Select, modify and contract. 1 pixel is enough for what I need!
Now, I have the area I want, and I want to get rid of the color behind it. So I don't want to actually affect THIS layer, but a layer BELOW it. So I go over to the layer tab there, and I click on the one I want. In this case. I'm working on 1. I want to get rid of a bit of yellow in layer 2. So I click to highlight that layer.
Follow the prompts to get to desaturate, and VOOSH, the gold in JUST that circle is gone and turned into a nice neutral gray. It gives me a nice dull blue, but I want something a little brighter, so let me get a new layer on top of that.
Vivid light this time!
Remember what I said about selections? I can only draw in that area that's selected. That works no matter what layer I'm on. And it's really handy for things like highlights around boarders like this. I draw a nice little comma shape of brighter blue to give his eyes two shades.
And I'm done! Toss on some borders however you like to do that, and you're ready to save! In photoshop it's save for web and in image ready, it's save optimized.
For those of you editing jpg and gif files, that's it! SAVE AS YOU LIKE.
For those of you editing png. Hang on. Most scanlators use png files because of a nice, sharp look to the saves. The bad part is when you save to a png file, you lose the layers that were on top of it. Which means all that coloring work you did, the borders, everything, is lost.
We can prevent that.
Go here! And Flatten the image. This takes all those layers and turns it into one.
Like this! As you can see, all the layers are gone. You have just one background image. It's the original drawing. Now, go back to the previous step and save. Your work is safe!
The end result again is here!
EDIT: Suelo informs me that using save as instead of save for web will cause automatic flattening. Give it a try!
Most icons don't require this amount of work, but by using Akito's icons, that pretty much gives you a run down of just about anything you could commonly encounter prettying up your icons.
To give you an easier example, here's what I do with Agito's icons.
Here I am again with my basic icon, sized down where I like it and my color template.
This time I pick Overlay as my base, because Agito needs a stronger color.
First! I use the bucket tool and fill with blue, then use the sample tool and get some gold.
I zoom in pretty far, and caaareeefully color in my gold. No additional layers needed because overlay is already strong enough that I don't need to amplify it any further.
Borders and save!
THIS IS WHY I HAVE A LOT MORE AGITO ICONS. Because he's less of a bitch than Akito.
BUT THIS IS NOT ALL THAT YOU CAN DO WITH LAYERS. Oh no!
Suppose, if you will, I had this badass image of badassery. And I wanted to see what I could do with it. Naturally, I use a nice strong Overlay layer, and fill it with Agito's blue.
But that's not strong enough, so lets DUPLICATE the layer.
Now it's a rather eyecatching bright blue!
Except I think that's lame. So lets just toss this layer right now. Right click on that layer in our handy layers tab. All that blue gone!
Lets say the image was too light. I put another layer in... soft light this time. Fill it with black. But it's too dark, so I go lighten it until it looks darker, striking, but not overwhelming. Sleek!
Except nah, that's not what I want to do. Lets colorize!
But now I decide that Kazu stands out too much. Lets color him in with white. He's lightened now, and as a comic effect, looks shocked, washed out. Less a part of the action going on.
But that's not enough, lets make those flames a little brighter. They don't look quite right blue. A little coloring hereeee.
Well, you get the point. The point IS, play around, you know all the options now, and you can color over, fill over, and redraw until you get it the way you want. And with the layers, you don't have to worry about it messing up the lines below!
And I'm spent.
EDIT: Scintilla offers a free alternative to photoshop here! Which should be quite similar. (I know it's a favored tool, and recommended in video editing lists.) I haven't played around in it yet, but the suggestion is there for those who might be interested!