Flashback Saturday - White Collar Pilot icons

[sandy79]

Another batch of icons, this time for Round 2 of episodes20in20. My claim was the pilot episode of White Collar. Hope you like them!

10 THEMES
first scene	hair	b&w on color	far away	fake background
shadows	weapon	fave character	muted	one word
5 CATEGORY / SAME PICTURE
01	02	03	04	05
5 ARTIST'S CHOICE - It Takes Two...
01	02	03	04	05

weapon: since we only have the SWAT team towards the end with guns (and one of Hagen's goons), I decided to label Neal's brilliant mind as a weapon of some kind.

Category - One Picture: I had some trouble to find the right pic for these five icons. Finally, I settled with this, since Neal is somewhat relaxed in that scene (not to mention the glee on his face when Peter hands him his badge)

Artist's Choice: From the beginning, we saw so many wonderful teams on the show. I know that even in the pilot episode, there are far more than just that five, but they are like the best of the best (at least to me)


Picture credits:
screencaps by kanarek13, screencappednet and midnight_road


As always, comments are more than appreciated, as well as hints for making them better.
If you take them, please give credit where it's due.

Comments

[tinny]

Good job! I like First Scene and Hair, but I'm especially impressed by the creativity in your category set. If you can't change the cap, change the colors. :D I like them all, but especially #3, the vintage coloring gives it such a melancholy air, and #4, very artistic.

eta: because you explicitly asked for hints to improve: it's no coincidence that I picked the icons from your set that have a lot of contrast. I suggest adding light and contrast to your icons.

If you're working with Photoshop, try adding a Gradient Map Adjustment Layer (with a simple black-white gradient) and set it to screen to lighten the image. Set it to Soft Light to increase contrast. Play with the opacity of the adjustment layer until you like how it looks.

You can get a similar effect with a Levels Adjustment layer, just slide the middle (grey) arrow and/or the right (white) arrow to the left to lighten up the image. If you don't have Photoshop, simply use the Levels tool.

As a rule of thumb, you want to end up with an icon whose focus (i.e. usually the person) is not darker than the rest of it.

If you have any questions because I wasn't clear in my descriptions, feel free to ask, I'm always happy to help. (I'm off for the next week though so it may take a while.)

[sandy79.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, especially for the hints. *hugs*

I'm working with what I call a "joint-venture" between Picasa, Microsoft Office Picture Manager (I guess that's the official name) and other software like Pixlr, GIMP, Paint.Net and PhotoScape. Nonetheless, I'm gonna try to keep your advices in mind when I'm working on my next challenges.

Yeah, the category was quite a tricky one XD But on the other hand, it was a good way for me to try out several effects and different levels. Therefore, I'm very happy that you like them so much *blushes*

Happy Holidays!!

[tinny]

OK, I don't know all of them, but gimp is great, and I use Paint.net myself (at work). It misses the soft-edged brushes, which sucks, but it has great layering and blending capabilities, so you should be able to do a lot with that.

In Paint.net, once you have the icon cropped and resized, what you do is:

1) you duplicate your base layer and then

2) apply an adjustment to it. E.g. Levels. The sliders there are vertical (not horizontal like in PS). Normally, caps are always too dark, so in the original image (on the left), the peaks will all be clustered at the bottom, and what you want to do is spread out the peaks on the right side over the whole spectrum. So you slide them up to make it lighter.

Don't hesitate to overdo it here, it's just a copy, and you can lower its opacity again in the next step.

You can also use Curves or Contrast adjustment instead of Levels, they work well, too. It's a matter of preference, whatever you like working with.

So. Then you have a lightened copy of your layer. Double click on it and then play with the blending mode and opacity. Additive and screen will give you lightened results, overlay and multiply will darken the image. If you want to avoid the colors becoming too vibrant, you can always desaturate your copied layer.

Generally, don't be afraid of having tons of layers. If you see tutorials, people often have 20 or 30 layers in their files. I usually make do with less than 10, but always at least 4 (base, sharpened copy, lighting, texture).

I hope this is more helpful, since my first comment was very Photoshop-specific.