Tutorials::Icon Tutorial 02

Intro

In this tutorial I'll guide you through the steps I go through to make an icon.
This is what you will be making:

Step 1

In this tutorial I will be making a Scrubs avatar out of this picture:

Open this picture with photoshop.

Step2

Crop the picture to the size 100px by 100px so it looks something like this:

When you crop a picture, make sure it includes everything that you want to include. In this case, it was the faces and their shoulders. I also wanted some white space on either side. Don't worry about the excess, because you can always edit that out later. Keep your final image in mind.

Step 3

It looks a bit too foggy for me, so I'm going to sharpen it. (Go to Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen.)

Since I use sharpen a lot, I use a little shortcut: Once you have used sharpen for the first time in the process of making somethig by going to Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen, the Ctrl+F shortcut is available to you. What it does is let you use the last filter you used. So the next time you want to use sharpen, just hit Ctrl+F. Yay!

Step 4

As you can see, the picture is completely centered (which looks boring sometimes) and there's not a very good place for text. To fix that, all you have to do is create a new layer. Once you have done that, fill the empty layer with a solid color with the paint bucket tool. Move this layer down beneath the picture.

Step 5

Using the move tool (V), slide the picture down a little more than half way.

Now you have a good place to put text, it doesn't look boring, and you have room to add lots of effects.

Step 6

There's lots of things you can do from this step, but I decided to turn the bottom layer black.

I think there's a bit too much white at the top, so using the rectangular marquee tool and the eraser tool, I took some of that off. Now it looks like this:

Step 7

Next, I add text. Using the font "SimSun" 10pt, I typed "Scrubs" in capital letters, added a space between every letter, and put it in the very center of the icon. (To get something perfectly in the middle, hit Ctrl+A (Select All), Ctrl+C (Copy), and Ctrl+D (Deselect) to copy the entire layer. Delete the layer. Create a new layer and then hit Ctrl+V (Paste). The text should now be in the middle.)

Step 8

You can stop here, but the black is too plain for my taste, so I will add this scan onto the icon. The image is huge, as you can see, so first open it up in photoshop. Then, using the crop tool (still set to 100 px by 100 px at the top) crop the part of the scan that you want to use. This is what I cropped:

If you want to use this type of stock on a solid black surface, first you have to invert the picture so that the background is black. Hit Ctrl+I or go to Image>Adjust>Invert.

Step 9

Paste the section of the scan onto the icon. Set the layer to "Screen".

I only want the scan to show up on the black, though, so select the layer with the scan. Use the marquee tool to select the part that's not black. Then use the eraser tool to erase everything inside the box.

Step 10

Now the line seperating the black and white seems too flat, so I'm going to fix that with a gradient. Create a new layer and change the foreground to black. Then, apply a gradient down far enough so that it goes past the line, but it doesn't cover their faces.

Then, use the eraser tool to erase everything except the part beneath the line.

Step 11

Finish it off by adding some brushes and textures. As for me, I added a brush from my Text 2 brush set above the text. Then I used one of my icon textures (this one). I set the texture to Hard Light, and using a soft eraser brush at 12%, I erased some of the texture so that it wasn't so dark.

Other

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Do you have any questions or comments? E-mail me.
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