arqueete | Tutorial: Dreams icon (Reply)

My icon style has change a lot lately, and I'm pleased with how my icons are turning out now. So I thought I'd share with you all how I made one of my recent icons with lyrics from the song 'Listen to your heart' by DHT.

This tutorial was made using Photoshop CS and assumes you have a basic knowledge on how to use it, but the directions should work in most recent versions of Photoshop.

We start, naturally, by cropping our image to 100x100.

Then we'll us Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and turn the contrast up to about +20, then use the smudge tool with a strength of about 12 and size of about 5 pixels and smooth the skin of her cheek, neck, and forehead, then use the blur tool with a strength of about 10 and size about 5px, and blur these areas a little. Then, Filter>Sharpen.

Now, double-click the background layer and you'll get a dialogue box asking if you want to make New Layer 'Layer 0', hit OK. Your background layer should now say 'Layer 0'. Right-click it, go to 'Duplicate Layer...', hit OK. Take the top layer ('Layer 0 copy'), change the blending mode to 'screen'.

Double-click the top layer (double-click the little thumbnail, not the name of the layer), and the layer styles window should come up. Click color overlay. Change the blend mode to 'Color', change the opacity to about 20%. Double-click the red rectangle to change the color of the overlay, I'm using #FF6C00 for this layer...

Hit OK.

Double-click 'Layer 0', bringing up the layer styles window again. Go to color overlay again, blend mode to color, opacity to 20. I'm going with #0060FF for my color this time.

Now, lighting effects. Go to Filter>Render>Lighting Effects... and set as so:

Hit OK. You should have this:

Now I'm going to make a new layer above 'Layer 0 copy', then use the brush entitled 'sporchi2' from 8nero.net/brushes from what I believe is set 86 to seem to sparkle in the beam of light from the lighting effects filter. Erase specks where they're not wanted, change opacity where needed so not every speck has the same... Its really a matter of trial and error and personal opinion. In the end, my layer has an opacity of 88% and the image looks like this: