[anonymous1]

Originally Posted by dubenko_junkie Actually a lot of the PSP and PS steps and actions tend to be the same, if located under other menus and whatnot from what I can gather. I've never used PSP but I've seen people create similar of not duplicate effects with that software. You can always get a trial version of PS for free from Adobe's website. That's what I did before getting my hands on an older version of the program. As for what I did with these, it's just layers until I get the look I'm going for. Edited to clarify what I did with the images: After cropping them to the size I wanted, 100x100 in this case, I used the Sharpen tool and generally went over the eyes and lips once with the tool. From there I adjusted the brightness and contrast until the colors looked richer to me, also turning the contrast up seems to help fight the sometimes bad lighting tptb use when filming scenes. I don't know if PSP uses layers the way that PS does, but I duplicated the image and between the two pictures I added three layers. Light blue, dark almost navy blue and then a golden yellow. I set the light blue to Color Burn in PS, which intensifies the blue colors in the image, adjusted it to 50% opacity and the dark blue to Exclusion which reoves the darkest blues from the image giving the picture an aged, but still colorful quality. The yellow layer I set toa 10% opacity just to create a bit of a high light. Merged all the layers and then added the text and or brushes on an additional layer.

Thanks for that "tutorial". I'm a new PS user so I'm always on the lookout for step-by-step things!

[dubenko_junkie]

Originally Posted by anonymous1 Thanks for that "tutorial". I'm a new PS user so I'm always on the lookout for step-by-step things!

No problem. I like to play around a lot and just see what happens. Sadly I tend to forget to pay attention to exactly what's I've done to make a particular icon, but this little trick is something I do often.

Another fun thing to do is duplicate your base and desaturate it, leaving you with a black and white image on top and then using the magic wand tool, erase bits of the image to let color show through, like the eyes or lips.