Useful (Pointer)

[jheti]

For making icons with! Pictures included to illustrate the point. They're of Greed, of course, because he's snacking on my brain and the basement of my soul, possibly, and I think I like it.

*Ahem.* Anyway.

I'm not being patronizing. I'm cramming in every detail I can think of, because I get lost reading other people's tutorials that DON'T have all the details.



I found at this fansite. Thanx/credit for Summoner Collette. See, I'm not a thief. XD

Usually, when I'm cropping and my image is a rectangle, I will make New image that is larger than it and also a square. (Say, 300x300 or 500x500. Any shape where it's the same size for wide and tall, because LJ icons are 100x100.)

Then I use the Crop tool, holding down the Shift key that's super important, because it keeps the CROPPING square shaped too, so everything is a square, so it won't look like total ass when we're finished.

Following me so far? Okay.

The problem with this method is that there's still Resize involved. With certain pictures, especially delicious manga scans of Greed lineart or grayscale/black and white images, you lose a lot of detail by making them 100x100.

See?

This --> was the best it was going to look if I did it this way. That made me sad. So I spent a while thinking of how not to have to shrink the image so much.

In Photoshop, pick the Selection tool. (It's the top one on the left. It looks like a box made of dashes.) In the tan row underneath File, Edit blah blah, you should see a dashed box and a bunch of weird options, and then a box that says "Feather". Leave that box alone.

THEN: There is a roll-down menu that says "Style". Pick "Fixed Size". In the white boxes that say Height and Width next to them, type "100 px" and "100 px" WITH THE SPACE. (I'm not sure that matters, but I used the space and it worked, so maybe it needs the space. Better safe than sorry.)

Because "px" means "pixels" and that's what we're talking about here, the size of our box. You can move the little dashed box around inside the image and kind of "frame" the parts you want to look at.

It's important that you have the DASHED BOX chosen in the side menu and NOT the little weathervane-looking arrow thing, otherwise it will "cut" your selection out and move it all the hell around and make the picture suck. So. Head's up.

Now, for this image specifically, that didn't work. My dashed box was too small to grab onto all the parts of the picture that I liked, so I made it 200 px wide and tall, just to "see" how more of the picture would look framed.

Here's the secret part: when you have stuff framed by your dashed box, and you like it that way, go to the File, Edit, etc. etc. top tan bar, and choose

Image and then Crop. Everything that wasn't inside your dashed box goes away, BUT no Resize took place, so there's no loss of detail! ^_^

Well, in the case of this picture that's kind of a lie, because I don't want a 200x200, I want a 100x100. So I gradually put smaller values in the Width and Height white boxes at the top. This made my dashed box smaller and smaller, but in stages, so I could still pick what I liked best about the picture WITHOUT resizing it.

At about 125x125, my dashed box was happy and perfect. So I chose Image > Crop.

THEN, I went to Image > Image Size, and made sure the Constrain Proportions box was checked. I ended up with 100X102, because my crop was a little off. I'm going to go back and get rid of the extra two pixels manually. How?

By going back to the white boxes and repeating "100 px" wide and tall and then choosing Image > Crop.

It came out like this .

Which is much nicer than this .

The end ^_^

There you have it.