PSD Fest! - Isaac from TW
Sep. 14th, 2013 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laisserais posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
smallbatchiconsI'm so glad so many of you have chosen to play along! It's been a lot of fun getting to see your styles. I feel like icons don't get enough love as a fannish production. They can take a lot of effort and thought. Y'all should be celebrated more.
Before I post mine, I wanted to share a couple of more PS tutorials that I have found helpful:
-->Opacity vs. Fill
-->Three great uses for High Pass Filter
-->Making Selections with the Pen Tool
Ok, for my first one, I decided to go with this one [negative space yay!]:
I wish I'd saved the layer where I cut Isaac and Kali out. It was my first time using the pen tool. Using the pen tool can be tricky, but it gives much better results than the lasso.
I started with a solid color fill:
#61606b
Then I put a gradient fill over it. I started out doing various things, like setting it to color burn, etc, but decided to set it to screen, ultimately. It's at 90 degrees, 100% fill.
I pasted in the cut out layer with Kali and Isaac, and fiddled with size in relation to the overall square.
I used guides to find the center, and then moved them about quite a bit until they 'felt' centered, even though they're technically not. The way she's leaning back a bit made it feel lopsided at true center.
The reason I ended up going with the blue gradient is because once I'd pasted the people in, the pink [set on color burn, the blue was pink] stood out too much. I felt like the blue complemented them both and helped minimize any contrastyness left over from the pen tool at the edges.
Then I did the following in clipping masks, tethered to just the people layer, not affecting the background:
Did a gamma layer, set to 1.16. This is a trick I picked up for SPN caps, which are dark. Gamma and Exposure can help bring up the light values without flattening or blowing out everything. It's subtler, I find. And there's better control than with a copy-paste-screen layer.
Next was a color balance layer, where I made the shadows greener, the midtones bluer and the highlights more yellow. I find a good trick for clearing up tiny detail is to fake it with cyans and whites. Yellow and magenta warms images up, sure, but they also give the impression of blurriness sometimes. I just nudged each one by +/- ~10.
Next is a saturation layer. I boosted the master color levels and darkened it. +13 saturation/-5 lightness. This warmed it up a little and helped with the edges of the image. Which now that I'm looking at it on my new monitor, the edges look way too contrasty. Sigh.
Still in clipping mask, I boosted brightness and contrast a teensy bit.
+5/+5 for each.
Again, I wish I'd learned the trick of copying my text layers before I rasterized them sooner. I don't have details on how this looked to start with. Pretty sure it's helvetica? Then stretched with somewhere around +100 kerning points between the letters. I set it to color burn, because I like the subtle look, then I played around with the text color til it looked just a shade or two off the background shade.
I know in TW 'omega' doesn't mean necessarily mean the lowest wolf in the pack, but it tickles me to think of Isaac as a traditional omega. And I dunno, this scene, taken out of context, could be Kali giving him the bad news: he's going to be the whole pack's bitch for the rest of time.
Voila!
Before I post mine, I wanted to share a couple of more PS tutorials that I have found helpful:
-->Opacity vs. Fill
-->Three great uses for High Pass Filter
-->Making Selections with the Pen Tool
Ok, for my first one, I decided to go with this one [negative space yay!]:
I wish I'd saved the layer where I cut Isaac and Kali out. It was my first time using the pen tool. Using the pen tool can be tricky, but it gives much better results than the lasso.
I started with a solid color fill:
#61606b
Then I put a gradient fill over it. I started out doing various things, like setting it to color burn, etc, but decided to set it to screen, ultimately. It's at 90 degrees, 100% fill.
I pasted in the cut out layer with Kali and Isaac, and fiddled with size in relation to the overall square.
I used guides to find the center, and then moved them about quite a bit until they 'felt' centered, even though they're technically not. The way she's leaning back a bit made it feel lopsided at true center.
The reason I ended up going with the blue gradient is because once I'd pasted the people in, the pink [set on color burn, the blue was pink] stood out too much. I felt like the blue complemented them both and helped minimize any contrastyness left over from the pen tool at the edges.
Then I did the following in clipping masks, tethered to just the people layer, not affecting the background:
Did a gamma layer, set to 1.16. This is a trick I picked up for SPN caps, which are dark. Gamma and Exposure can help bring up the light values without flattening or blowing out everything. It's subtler, I find. And there's better control than with a copy-paste-screen layer.
Next was a color balance layer, where I made the shadows greener, the midtones bluer and the highlights more yellow. I find a good trick for clearing up tiny detail is to fake it with cyans and whites. Yellow and magenta warms images up, sure, but they also give the impression of blurriness sometimes. I just nudged each one by +/- ~10.
Next is a saturation layer. I boosted the master color levels and darkened it. +13 saturation/-5 lightness. This warmed it up a little and helped with the edges of the image. Which now that I'm looking at it on my new monitor, the edges look way too contrasty. Sigh.
Still in clipping mask, I boosted brightness and contrast a teensy bit.
+5/+5 for each.
Again, I wish I'd learned the trick of copying my text layers before I rasterized them sooner. I don't have details on how this looked to start with. Pretty sure it's helvetica? Then stretched with somewhere around +100 kerning points between the letters. I set it to color burn, because I like the subtle look, then I played around with the text color til it looked just a shade or two off the background shade.
I know in TW 'omega' doesn't mean necessarily mean the lowest wolf in the pack, but it tickles me to think of Isaac as a traditional omega. And I dunno, this scene, taken out of context, could be Kali giving him the bad news: he's going to be the whole pack's bitch for the rest of time.
Voila!
