Winner's Tutorial, Challenge 37, by rissa_jennings
Thank you again for the votes in the last challenge - I was really surprised to win! This tutorial is written in Photoshop 7, but should be translatable to any program that can use Curves.
We’ll be going from
to
.
First, crop and resize your base to LJ’s 100x100 pixels. The hardest part for me, with this image, was finding a crop I liked. I finally decided to settle on the bug, because I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with the big red flower. Sharpen if you feel your image needs it; I believe I did, using the Unsharp Mask filter. This becomes our base:
Duplicate the base and set it to soft light. This adds a lot of contrast and brightens up the colors.
Next, I added a Curves layer. What this did was add a bit of yellow to the greens in the background, and it also highlights the bug by darkening the shadows along the righthand side of the icon. I left the Green settings alone for this icon, as there’s plenty of green I the icon already. These are the settings I used:
RGB:
Input - 144, Output - 172
Input - 121, Output - 132
Red:
Input - 133, Output - 164
Blue:
Input - 139, Output - 161
The end result:
Now, for textures. The first one I used is by colorfilter, and I added this on top of the icon and set it to Hard Light at 100 percent opacity. I liked the little details of the flowers in the corner and how it added some other colors to the icon.
To get the circle in the center, I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to cut out a circle in the center of the texture, so the bug would show through the texture and the flowers along the side looked almost like a picture frame of sorts. To make a perfect circle, hold the Shift key while selecting the area you want. With the circle still highlighted, go to Edit < Stroke to add a 2px wide border in red (I used #941400, one of the reds in the flowers in the texture). This help makes more of the “picture frame” idea.
to
I still wanted something to really make the icon shine, so I opened up a lens flare texture from xonlyashesx and set it on top of the icon at Screen, 100 percent opacity. I moved it around so it was on top of the bug, making the center of the icon really pop. And that’s it!
to
Comments? Questions? Let me know if I didn’t explain something and I’ll be happy to help :D
We’ll be going from
to
.
First, crop and resize your base to LJ’s 100x100 pixels. The hardest part for me, with this image, was finding a crop I liked. I finally decided to settle on the bug, because I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with the big red flower. Sharpen if you feel your image needs it; I believe I did, using the Unsharp Mask filter. This becomes our base:
Duplicate the base and set it to soft light. This adds a lot of contrast and brightens up the colors.
Next, I added a Curves layer. What this did was add a bit of yellow to the greens in the background, and it also highlights the bug by darkening the shadows along the righthand side of the icon. I left the Green settings alone for this icon, as there’s plenty of green I the icon already. These are the settings I used:
RGB:
Input - 144, Output - 172
Input - 121, Output - 132
Red:
Input - 133, Output - 164
Blue:
Input - 139, Output - 161
The end result:
Now, for textures. The first one I used is by colorfilter, and I added this on top of the icon and set it to Hard Light at 100 percent opacity. I liked the little details of the flowers in the corner and how it added some other colors to the icon.
To get the circle in the center, I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to cut out a circle in the center of the texture, so the bug would show through the texture and the flowers along the side looked almost like a picture frame of sorts. To make a perfect circle, hold the Shift key while selecting the area you want. With the circle still highlighted, go to Edit < Stroke to add a 2px wide border in red (I used #941400, one of the reds in the flowers in the texture). This help makes more of the “picture frame” idea.
to
I still wanted something to really make the icon shine, so I opened up a lens flare texture from xonlyashesx and set it on top of the icon at Screen, 100 percent opacity. I moved it around so it was on top of the bug, making the center of the icon really pop. And that’s it!
to
Comments? Questions? Let me know if I didn’t explain something and I’ll be happy to help :D