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]

\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.