Tutorial # 01 ⇨ Giving Cartoon Icons Oomph

[lavaliere]

Program: Photoshop 7
Translatable: No
Skill: Easy → Medium

Go from to


❶ Prep your base. I used a cap of Pride Salim Bradley from the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Crop your base. I used Auto-contrast, Auto-levels, and Auto-colors to get this:


➋ Adding oomph. This is a lot more simple than it looks. Duplicate your base and drag it to the top. Then, add a High Pass filter. You can find it in PS7 under Filter » Other » High Pass. You'll get this pop up window. The default is usually 10, but as you can see, I set mine to 15. Feel free to play with this until you get a setting you like.

Result:
Not very pretty, is it? But we'll fix that.

➌ Set the High Pass layer to overlay. It doesn't necessarily have to be overlay. Soft Light and Hard Light can work too, depending on the cap. Feel free to play with it until you find a setting that works best.

Result:
My first result was a bit too over sharpened for my taste, so I added a 0.5 Gaussian Blur.

Can't tell the difference between the base and the new version? Here's a comparison. See how it gives the base more dimension?

➍ Add your coloring. From here, I used a coloring similar to what unasuvas uses here.

Result:
My layer pallet.

➎ Finish and save. Feel free to play with your icon. Add lighting or textures as you like to make it your own. I added a light texture by shalowater for mine.

Other icons using this technique:


NOTES:
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