THE DOCTOR and AMY (tutorial)
TUTORIAL: The Doctor and Amy
Program: Photoshop 7
Level of Difficulty: Medium
Tools: Filters (sharpen, blur), Blending modes, brushes, layers masks, curves.
Translatable? I think you can make this work in other programs, yeah.
Tied for the top tutorial spot was The Doctor and Amy icon. I made it shortly after the Doctor Who Christmas special aired for an icon challenge, I think. But, at the same time, I was also making icons for a fest where the Christmas special was getting a good deal of requests. So I had TONS of screencaps open from the episode. So I really don't know why I went with this particular composition. Probably because I liked the contrasting colors (and the Doctor's expression in his cap).
Anyway, you can find all the original caps here in a gallery set up by emmahyphenjane. The specific caps are this one and this one.
NOTE: In this tutorial, I am going to work with a 300x300 canvas to start with. Keep that in mind while you are reading.
STEP ONE: AMY
In this case, I worked with each image separately before bringing them together, so to speak, for the final coloring touches and so on. I worked with Amy first. I don't know why. Let's just say it went alphabetically.
I pasted the full screencap into a new canvas, and then I cropped most of Rory out of the picture since I didn't want anything cluttering up the focus. I tried my best to keep Amy in the center. So once I had cropped that I resized the canvas down so that the width was 300 pixels. I ended up with this as my base image:
I then took that base image and copy & pasted it onto a 300x300 canvas. Looking at the screencap, you can see the blue line of light near the bottom. Since I had chosen a screencap of the Doctor that was primarily blue, I decided it would be best to place Amy at the top of the icon and the Doctor at the bottom using the blue line as a blending point. So I moved the image of Amy to the top of the icon. Then it was time to prep the image a bit.
So I'm all about contrast and light in my icons, really, and I use soft light layers and brushes to create that effect. That's what we're going to do.
I duplicated the image of Amy twice, and set both layers to SOFT LIGHT; both layers are at full opacity. You'll see that the image gets quite dark and contrasted because of that. The red in the image also becomes quite saturated.
At this stage, the icons is a) too dark and b) far too red. However, a little light will fix that right up. So I created a new (empty) layer BETWEEN the two soft light layers. Using a soft, round brush and a light beige color, I brushed some light over top of the places I wanted to highlight. In this case, I was mostly concerned with lightening (and thereby lessening the saturation) of Amy's face. All my light went there. It makes a lot of difference. Adding the light creates a more dynamic effect (the light on her face versus the heavy contrast of her hair for instance).
And the final touch on the base prep for Amy was to copy merge (EDIT >> COPY MERGED or Shft+Ctrl+C) and paste onto a new layer at the very top of the layer palette. And then I sharpened that layer using the Unsharp Mask (Filter >> Sharpen >> Unsharp Mask). I think I just use the default settings (Amount: 50%, Radius: 1.0 pixels, Threshold: 0 levels), and if need be I'll reduce the opacity of the layer. In this case, though, I left the layer at full opacity.
And that's it for Amy (for now, anyway). It's time to move on.
STEP TWO: THE DOCTOR
We're going to jazz up the Doctor in much the same way we went about prepping Amy. There are one or two changes though.
Like we did with Amy, the Doctor screencap needs to be cropped down. Since Amy is already centered, I decided the keep the Doctor to the far left so that the icon had more than one level of cropping. This was fairly easy since he was standing to the left already. It also looks like I went ahead and duplicated that image and set it to SOFT LIGHT before resizing with a width of 300 pixels.
Now it is time to relocate the Doctor so he's on the same canvas as Amy. The image needs to be pasted onto the canvas, and then moved to the bottom in preparation for blending the two images together.
Alright, if you remember I said before that the blue line of light on the Amy screencap was going to be our point of blending. In other words, that's where I want the two images to meet up. Right now the screencap of the Doctor is covering up too much of Amy. So in order to blend to the images together, I need to use a LAYER MASK to mask away or "hide" the portions of the Doctor screencap that I don't need; I'm going to use the blue line as a guide as to where I should mask. The only thing above the blue line that won't get masked is the Doctor's head.
So find the little layer mask button on the bottom of the layer palette, and making sure that the layer with the screencap of the Doctor is selected, I add a layer mask. Then using a soft, round brush in black, I brush over the parts of the image I don't want to see anymore. I allowed myself to be a little messy with this one. You can see in the big version here that there are imperfections here and there. One of the benefits (and handicaps) of working on a bigger canvas means that a lot of the imperfections go away when you resize (unfortunately, you'll probably spend a lot of time worrying about/fixing the imperfections before realizing that no one will see them anyway).
(Actual Layer Mask | Finished Product)
Right so now I need to go about adding some more contrast and some light to the image of the Doctor. TO do that, I duplicated the layer with the Doctor on it TWICE and set both layers to SOFT LIGHT (the first layer is at full opacity; the second layer is at 50% opacity because the image was already dark and didn't need as much contrast). Now with the Doctor it is a little bit different. The image I used was primarily dark in comparison to Amy, so it needs a lot more light. At the same time, I want to preserve the shadows, so I don't want my light to ruin that. As a compromise, I put a new (empty) layer beneath BOTH soft light layers, and use a soft, round brush and light beige color to brush light all over the Doctor. This means I get the effect of the light while the soft light layers make sure the beige doesn't pollute the dark blue shadows too obviously.
And that's our final overall base image.
STEP THREE: UM, OTHER STUFF I DID?
What? I didn't know what to call this section! Technically, it is coloring, but I also do my finishing touches, etc. etc.
Alright, so I had my final base, and I was ready to color or whatever. Basically, I wanted something that would unify the two images together. I did want to keep the color contrasts, so I didn't want to alter the overall coloring of either image. I probably fiddled around a bit before coming to a solution. The solution was MOTION BLUR (Filter >> Blur >> Motion Blur).
Motion Blur is my go to tool when I need to soften the way I've blended something, and, in this case, I also wanted to spread the color out a little; maybe add some blue highlights to the image of Amy. So I copy merged everything, and pasted it as a new layer at the top of the layer palette. Then I opened up the Motion Blur menu and fiddled around a bit. I can't tell you exactly what the settings were, but I know for sure I had it set at a 90 degree angle (so straight up and down, pretty much). And then I fiddled with the blending mode of the layer until I settled on SCREEN.
>>
You can see how it softens up the edges of where I've blended the two images together. It also had the bonus of lightening up the overall image as well as adding warmer tones to the Doctor and blue hues to Amy. Unfortunately, we've lost almost all of our contrast, so that needs to be added back. I copy merged and pasted the new layer at the top of my layer palette. To add back contrast, Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light are the best bets. My default would be soft light, but in this case, soft light wouldn't be enough. So I decided to take a risk, and I set the layer to OVERLAY at full opacity. Overlay can sometimes be far, far too much. In this case, however, I was happy with the results especially the colors on Amy's hair.
The only problem is that there's still not enough contrast on Amy's face. it looks washed out in comparison to the rest of the icon; that needed to be fixed without messing with the rest of the icon. So I duplicated the overlay layer ONCE. This fixed Amy's face, but it over exposed the rest of the icon. To fix that, I added a layer mask to that layer, and I masked away the parts that I didn't need.
(Actual Layer Mask | Final Product)
At this point, I liked where I was at icon wise, so in anticipation of being finished, I copy merged everything, put the layer at the top, and used the Unsharp Mask option (full opacity): image if you want to see it. However, once I resized it (have a look), I wasn't happy with the result; so I went back to the big canvas and kept working. Firstly, the coloring wasn't quite right (not enough blending and balance), and secondly, I thought the Doctor's face was still a little too dark especially in comparison with Amy's.
FIXING THE COLORING
Okay, so I guarantee you I fiddled about for awhile. I can't tell you what I did because I scrap things that don't work. But I probably messed with Variations a little and then moved onto various textures. In the end, I decided to go with a texture fix.
by iconographer
The above texture is one of my absolute favorites to work with. I've used it heaps lately. Since I have used it a lot, I know what it is capable of, and how to use it to do things that I want. In this case, I knew I could give Amy a little more contrast, the Doctor a bit more light and shade balance, and both of them some purple hues to even things out a bit using this one texture. I just needed to fix the texture up a little first.
The first problem is that the light side of the icon (which would brighten things) is on Amy's side, and the dark side of the texture (which will, obviously, darken things) is on the Doctor's side. So I flipped the texture around to correct that problem. The second problem is that the texture is too small for my 300x300 canvas. So I copied and pasted the texture onto the canvas and used the FREE TRANSFORM TOOL to stretch it to the correct width and height. And then, to smooth out the graininess that stretching the texture brings out, I used GAUSSIAN BLUR on just the texture itself.
And now the texture is ready to be used. In order to achieve the result I was looking for, I set the texture to SOFT LIGHT at full opacity. It did take away some of the vibrant red of Amy's hair so I masked that away very quickly, but left the rest as it was. The coloring, as you can see, looks a lot more even because the purple tones carry throughout the piece. Red and blue make purple, so it doesn't look out of place in either image. Plus the original contrast between the red and the blue still exists. I also darkened Amy up some more so that her features were more visible, and it changed the dynamic of the light playing on the Doctor to something more dramatic. My favorite thing about this texture is the divide between the dark and the light. It always, always creates an interesting effect on the images because it splits them in half like that.
BRIGHTENING UP THE DOCTOR
Now that I had the coloring the way I wanted it, I needed to fix the fact that the Doctor was still too dark. I also wanted to make sure I could preserve the contrast and keep his features visible though. So that I had lots of control over that, I opened up a CURVES layer. I dragged until I had the ratio of brightness and contrast that I wanted out of the image (no idea what the settings are, so here's a screenshot of what it looked like: here). I only wanted this to alter the Doctor though so I used the layer mask that adjustment layers are automatically equipped with to mask away everything except for the Doctor.
* If you are interested in learning more about how to use curves, talipuu just wrote up this fabulous tutorial on how to use them! You can find it here!
FINAL TOUCHES
Okay, so the icon was almost done. There was just one little thing that was bugging me. See I have this weird, irrational hate for random white space. It just irks me. I can't even begin to explain it. So that space behind Amy's head? It needed some work. I decided to brush in a different color. I couldn't use red because I didn't want to take away from the vibrancy of Amy's hair at all. I still wanted to use a color from the image though because it would all look more cohesive that way. So I grabbed the eye dropper tool, and used it to pick out a random blue (#051C84) from the image of the Doctor. Then I created a new layer, and using a soft brush, I painted over the white space. I used Gaussian blur to blur the edges where I brushed ever so slightly. But the blue is rather dark, and it doesn't blend very nicely at all.
So I scrolled through the blending modes, trying each one out until I found something I liked. I ended up setting the layer to EXCLUSION at 73% opacity. Now a navy blue layer set to exclusion turns light yellow. This added some variety to the half of the icon with Amy, and it got rid of the white space without being too intrusive.
And that was it! I resized down to 100x100 and saved as a .png file.
ETA: I knew I forgot something. My final layer palette looked like this: here.
I do want to spare a moment to talk about the focus of the icon because with both characters dominating the space and looking in different directions, it does seem like the focus wouldn't be clear. However, you should looking at the brightest spot of the icon first which, in my opinion, is where the line of light we used as a blending point starts at the Doctor's face. From there, you should follow the line of light past the Doctor and in the direction of Amy's gaze so that everything actually works together. When I make icons, I do take into account (most of the time, lol) where I want to focus of my icon to be so that things don't get too messy. It isn't just about getting the colors or composition to work but getting a central focus in the icon. I think most icon makers, once they've been iconning for a bit, just do this without thinking about it so much, but it is definitely a big part of the icon process. When modding the first round of turbo_rumble, I noticed that, in the critique, the "focus" of the icon would come up a lot which is why I stopped to mention it here.
Um, I'll stop rambling now. I hope you guys weren't too disappointed in how, er, uncomplicated this was?
END NOTES: You can link this anywhere you please as long as the link leads back to me (i.e Don't redistribute this tutorial saying that you wrote it). I'm probably not going to share the .psd, sorry. If you have any questions and/or want to discuss any portion of the tutorial with me, feel free!
I'm halfway finished with the text tutorial/guide/thing, and I'm hoping to get Rachel's Phone done this weekend. So fingers crossed that I get that up soon.