inquisitory ✭ 40; i'll put on my silver

I felt like writing a tutorial to uh, warm my mind up for studying math :'D Heeey my last exam's on Friday, I'm good! Also, because I just have to sneak in a quick plug, sign-ups for shoujo_battle round 03 are open~~~

Request by aurturius ♥

Go from to in Photoshop. Only uses one Selective Color layer, so translatable in theory :')

Here's the super-awesome group image from Tales of Symphonia 2, and here's our base~



I already knew when I cropped this one that I wanted the focus to be on Colette with a very thick border, so that's why the rest of it looks weird xD It'll work out, trust me. The base looks rather bland, so to start, let's up the shiny factor with a Soft Light, 100% duplicate of the base!



Gettin' there, but I want the shiny factor to be WAAAAY up there, so let's take a Hue/Saturation... adjustment layer with Saturation up to 27 to start! (for the record, I would've gone higher but Colette's hair would've blinded us all if I did)



ohohohoho, now we're talking. >:D See how far we got from that dull base in just two steps? I'm starting to see this icon as a battle against the dullness rofl. Anyway, we'll take it even further now! So grab a Selective Color... adjustment layer with this tutorial's (by luxrays, who else? ♥) settings in step 3 to make the shinies prettier :D



Suuuper! Now that the shinies are adequate, it's time to bring in the border. This one by eveningwalk is one of my favourites, so set it to Multiply, 100%. But wait, that's not all you have to do here! First, take a layer behind the texture layer and brush around the border on white. This'll prevent your image from "leaking" through the Multiply layer and making it icky-looking :') Alternatively, you could Magic Wand the inside of the border, then Select > Select Inverse your selection and the Paint Bucket it white, I think that's what I did. xD Now that that's done, you may have to re-position your image inside of the frame to fit to your liking.



Pretty, right? But I felt the colours of the frame were overpowering Colette in the middle there, so I desaturated the frame. This isn't as easy as just desaturating the layer (well, you could try, but I didn't xD) – from last step, take your layer of white around the frame, duplicate it, bring this duplicate to the top and set it to Color, 100%. This'll desaturate everything but the middle part, exactly what we want :D



But alas, the frame feels a little... flat, right? So take a rreeeeaaaallly soft brush with the colour black, and just dab away at two opposite corners. Your choice which, it doesn't really matter as long as the frame is more defined. Then, set this layer to 50% so it doesn't take over the whole icon.



Nice! 'Kay, second last thing. You know me and my slanted text, so let's slap some on here! 8D Sadly I couldn't find it on dafont (thank you kiminozune!), but the font is Plain Black Wide in white, and then I did my doofy shadow thing (duplicate the text, change it to black, nudge it over to the side a little the lower the opacity) :] The text doesn't exactly make sense, since it's only one picture, but it's lyrics from a song that was used to promote Brothers and Sisters on TV so it can't be all bad, right? xD



Okay, one more adjustment to make it stand out that much more! Make a Brightness/Contrast... adjustment layer with Contrast to 25, and you're done :DD Sa-weet!



Other examples:
(i'll grant you that these don't look very similar, but do share the same colouring structure xD like, the second one has an exclusion layer for the heck of it too)

I encourage you to go play around and show me your finished icons! DOOO IIIIIIT, I wanna see what you guys come up with~

If you like what you see, why not friend ewidentnie for future updates?