Hmm...

[hils]

Icon makers, I'd appreciate some concrit.

I am ashamed to say I have been thinking about this since that annonymous person commented that my fic and icons suck.

Do you think I sharpen my bases too much? I'm looking at the Buffy icons I just posted and some of them do look a bit wibbly. Do the rest of you sharpen before colouring? Hints and tips muchly appreciated

Comments

[ladydreamer.livejournal.com]

Honestly? The anon was over-exaggerating, but sometimes you can see that the picture is over sharpened, and that happens. The larger portion of your icons are lovely, and you coax some amazing colors out of them. And thank jeebus, you don't over-saturate or crop at weird ass angles. They can also shut up over the number of icons you put out, because you can always use more icons, amirite?

This pixel thing happens to me all the time, though, in iconning or manipping. I usually do sharpen before I color, but sometimes I'll sharpen before I resize to let the resize take care of extra pixels. And I either have to give up on sharpening it, or sharpen and use the little blur tool to fix specific areas. OR I'll just throw a Gaussian blur over it and take my sharpen tool to spiff areas that I want to stand out more than anything, usually the characters' eyes, mouths, and other details. Or I use the unsharp mask and try to control how bad the sharpening is making it look so I can fix it. I go back and forth a lot and blink like mad, gouge my eyes out and look away, then look back. It's not an easy process, especially when you're working with an image that kind of sucks.

I don't know what program you use, so I don't know if any of that will help, but it kind of depends on the image, for me, how I'm going to wrangle it into an icon. I think in the Buffy batch, you're dealing with an issue of the image being too dark to start with. I wouldn't develop a complex over what that person said, because they seemed to have a beef with you beyond one or two icons not being absolutely perfect.

[drusplace.livejournal.com]

OH! I use photoshop and you have DEFINITELY given me some new tips! THANKS! And you are right about the Buffy ones being too dark to start with. The show is SO dark in can be hard to do anything with some of the caps!

[hils.livejournal.com]

Thanks!! I use PSP and I'm sure there's thing I can do. I'll have to have a play around some time and try and learn some new tricks :)