My Board

Making Icons using Photoshop CS\' Premade Shapes

By Dren T. Martin




Yep here I am again giving you another tutorial. I hope this one will allow you to make your own icons so you can sell your icons to other people. Note that I do not go over everything in needs of making any icon. Also, I would not try and use photoshop shapes and sell them as icons because I\'m sure there is some kind of copyright on them through Adobe. Let\'s get started!

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• [*]Open up a 100x100 document for your icon.


• [*]Press \"U\" (This is the Custom Shape Tool) and in the drop down box at the top of Photoshop select the heart.


• [*]Draw a good sized heart on your canvas whilst holding the shift key to maintain a proportional heart.


• [*]In the color box at the top of Photoshop select a good red color. Here\'s mine:
  
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• [*]Right click the layer and select \"Rasterize Layer\".
  
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• [*]Now let\'s get into some nice blending options. This is what brings the icon to life in a way. Now note this is the effect I like on these type of icons. There are numerous different ways you can achieve a nice looking icon.


• [*]Tick \"Inner Glow\" and use the following settings:
  
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• [*]Now tick \"Stroke\" and make a 1px stroke with a darker red color.


• [*]Great.. We have our icon now. Maybe we should add a highlight to it. Get out the \"Eliptical Marquee Tool\"


• [*]Draw a big circle so there is a curved selection over the heart and fill it with white on a new layer.
  
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• [*]Great job. Now, CTRL + CLICK on the heart layer. This will select all the contents in the layer you just clicked. So in this case we have a heart selection.
  
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• [*]Now we added a stroke to the heart shape so we\'re going to have to include that in our selection also. Right now we\'re one pixel away from it so go to \"Select > Modify > Expand\" and enter in 1 for one pixel.


• [*]Now let\'s get rid of that excess white we have around the heart. Go to \"Select > Inverse\" and this will select everything outside of the heart shape.


• [*]Make sure you have the white layer selected and hit the delete key.


• [*]Great!! Now we have white only on our heart shape.
  
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• [*]Set the opacity percent level to something not to dark and not to light.. Just enough to make it seem like a highlight. Here\'s my finished product:
  
  attachment

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