my puny contribution to the .psd exchange

[tree]

I feel like I should begin with the caveat that I honestly have no idea what the hell I'm doing making icons, but every now and then something turns out okay.

This one is from last year, after I first learned the ways of duplicating layers and setting them to screen. Talk about your revelation! Also, up until a few weeks ago I was using Photoshop CS (yeah, that's right, oldskool with no numbers) so there's none of that vibrance or whatnot that the young whippersnappers use these days.

➽



I started with this dark, red mess from a Firefly screencap:



I duplicated my background and set it to screen at 100% opacity, which gave me a less dark, more yellow version:



It's still too dark, so I added a curves layer:



At this point, I finally got what I was after, namely the light shining on the right side of Inara's face. (There seems to be a trend of this sort of thing in my icons. Apparently I am obsessed with light?) Next up: fix the colours. I added a colour balance layer where I messed with everything, most significantly ramping up the blue in the highlights:



To lighten it even more, I added a this texture by colourmayfade



                                        and set it to screen at 80% opacity.



Finally to add some lustre and pinks to her skin I added this texture (unfortunately I don't know who made it):



                                        and set it to overlay at 35% opacity. Thus, an icon:



.psd here

(Note that I did not mention the agonising over whether to use 33% or 35% opacity, or -3 or -5 cyan in the midtones, etc. It took hours. Hours I tell you!)

Comments

[laisserais]

(Note that I did not mention the agonising over whether to use 33% or 35% opacity, or -3 or -5 cyan in the midtones, etc. It took hours. Hours I tell you!) HEE! oh my gosh, I FEEL you!

This is wonderful! You have a great sense of composition.

Did you recently get a new copy of PS? Or some alternate software? I really like what you did with the bokeh, too! Gives a great sense of light.

[tree]

oh, wow, thank you!

i've finally made the move to photoshop 6. it is like a whole new world. a very intimidating whole new world. having said that, i've watched a couple of tutorials on youtube and finally made my first animated gif. that was a good day. :D

[laisserais]

\o/ congrats! isn't 6 nice? I just got it myself like a week ago. Go you with the gifs. lol I keep forgetting to look up the tuts for those.

[goodbyebird]

You having a thing for light does show :)

[tree]

tree/light = OTP :D

[naushika]

Light is awesome! I looove playing with light. You understand it well for sure, cause I like what you did her with the light on the side of her face! One side of the face light and one side of the face dark is like, an icon kink of mine.

Props for using a texture on overlay.. overlay scares me, heh.

[tree]

oh man i am so bad at comments, but thank you very much!

everything about blending scares me! i just keep clicking things and hope something eventually works. :D