Tutorial

Subject: Tutorial Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:36 am

Open the pic you want to use. I'm gonna use a pic of Deki.

So, the pic is too dark. Lets lighten it up like so: Right click on your layer, and select 'Deplicate Layer'. Select the new layer and change the setting to Screen. Your pic should be lighter now and ready to be spiffified.

Now, select the Crop tool, and input 100x100 into the settings, like so:

Now crop your image.

Now its time to make it awesome. This doesn't work for every pic, but for mine, it does. Make a new layer, and flood fill it with a dark blue. It should give your pic a nice, subtle blue tint.

Now, lets open some textures we wanna use.

So I've opened about 7 Icon textures. I probably won't use them all, but I like to have options.

Okay, so lets experiment. Click on one of your textures and hit Ctrl+A to select the whole image, then Ctrl+C to copy it. Now go over to your icon, and paste it as a new layer by hitting Ctrl+V. Now just go through the list of settings on that layer to see which one looks best. I like Hard Light, so that's what I'll use.

Now just do the same thing with a new texture until your icon looks how you want it to.

Now since my original pic is hard to see, I need to Duplicate the original layer and move it to the top, then scroll through the layer settings to see what looks best. For my pic, Color Burn looked awesome.

So I'm pretty pleased with how it looks now. Let's add some text and a border to finish it off, shall we?

First, a border. You can do it the easy way by hitting Ctrl+A, then in the tool bar, Select, Modify.., Border. Set it to 2 pixels, and hit okay.

Now make a new layer, choose the Eyedrop tool, and pic a dark color from your icon. Now select the Flood tool, and fill in the border on the new layer. Now select the Selection tool again, right click on your icon, and select Deselect.

Now lets add some text. Select the Text tool (It looks like a T) and pick a font, and small size, around 8-14px.

And now you're done! Just go to File, Save As... and save it as a JPG, quality 12. Very Happy

Here is my result.

Ask if you have any trouble!
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Characters
Agatsuma / Kazuki / Dekirus