Ever see those cool avatars that people have on different message boards, myspace profiles, etc. and wonder how they make them? Well today I’m going to show you how with a photoshop tutorial that I had written a while back. I originally wrote this for Photoshop CS, but it still translates well for newer versions. This is what we’re going to be creating today:
So without any further delay, let’s get to it!
1. The Screencap
The first step you’re going to take is to get the screencap. What I did was download the trailer and just cap it off of that. So basically we start with this:
Here is the original screencap if you’d like to follow along. (Right-click and Save As)
Now obviously your icon can’t be that big, so what I like to do at this step is to crop (
) the part of the image that I’m going to use:
A tip that I find very useful is to hold down shift when you’re dragging the box around what you want to crop. By doing this you’re making sure that the crop selection is always a perfect square, and being that we’re shooting for a 100×100 icon, it’s easier to work with a square to start off with.
At this point I like to resize the image to 100×100 so that I can get an idea of what it will look like when it’s finished. Other people like to work with it at a larger size and then resize it down. It’s really up to personal preference and what you’re doing to it. For our purposes though, we’ll resize it. Now the image should look like this:
Now that we have our base, it’s time to start making it into a cool icon!
2. The Layers
The first thing I did at this point was to rename the first layer to “base” so that I know what it is. I then copied that layer and sharpened it twice (Filter->Sharpen->Sharpen, then do it again or you can just hit Control-F). So now our layers look like this:
I thought the icon was a bit dark, but I didn’t want to over do it, so what I did next was create a new layer, filled it with a pinkish color (#F8B5B6), and set it to Soft Light:
What I ended up with looked like this:
It’s getting there, but it still needs a little something. I decided to make a funky art deco border brush (Right-click and Save As) to kind of frame out Obi-Wan’s face a little. The brush I made is 100×100 and looks like this:
So what I did was create another layer above the others and using the eyedropper tool (
), chose an orangish color from the image (#ED6247). Then I selected the new layer and clicked once to drop in the border. The border has a long vertical stripe along the right edge and it covered up too much of Obi-Wan’s face, so what I did was flip it (Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontal) to get it to look right. I then lowered the Opacity of the layer to 53% and kept it as Normal. So our new layers should look like this:
and the icon now looks like this:
Now it’s starting to look pretty good! It still needs text though, so that’s the part we move on to next.
3. The Text
For the text, I sometimes find it easier to make it in a separate image and define it as a brush. Going through the steps to make the brush is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so I’ll just give you a link (Right-click and Save As) to the brush I made so you can use it too. The basic steps I used to make it were to make three separate layers and using the font Baskerville Old Face, put in the “You were the” in 7 point size on one layer, the “Chosen One” in 12 point on another layer, and draw a line using the line tool on the third layer. Then choose Edit->Define Brush Preset, and you’re done! Okay, just grab the dang brush that I linked you to 
Anywho, back to the text in the icon. Create a new layer on top of all the rest to put our text into. Then again using the eyedropper tool (, I picked an orangish color for my text (#E34B3D). I then clicked towards the top of the image to drop in the text (don’t forget to load that brush). That layer should look like this:
The text looks good, but because it’s an orangish color it wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be against the rest of the image. To fix this, the next thing I did was add a Drop Shadow layer style to that layer. I fiddled around with the settings and ended up with this:
As you can see the Blending Mode is set to Multiply and the color I used I grabbed from the shadows to Obi-Wan’s right (#451513). I also tooled around with the Distance, Spread, and Size to get the settings in the example. The only advice I could give you on the settings is to just preview it and play with it until you get it to a point that you like. The text at this point looks great, but now it’s a bit overpowering. So what I did was drop the Opacity of that layer to 75% and it looked perfect.
Take a breath, because we’re just about done!
4. The Finishing Touches
The only thing left at this point is to get it ready for the web. We have already resized it down to an icon-friendly 100×100, so we can skip that step. At this point all you have to do is go to Layers->Flatten Image to get it down to a single layer, and then go to File->Save For Web. I chose full quality jpg for my settings, and we’re done! Once again, this is what the final icon looks like:
That’s all there is to it. I hope this tutorial was clear enough to understand and follow along. Feel free to use the icon if you like. Here (Right-click and Save As) is a link to the final PSD file for you to play around with. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’ll do my best to try and help you. Thanks!
