rpanons | 008

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I admit, I'm not extremely familiar with gimp, but a lot of what you are asking really is just general for icon making.

Overall, when it comes to RP icons, simple is best. You want to start with a good quality screencap and then crop from there. I know gimp is a bit more of a pain about resizing, but how I like doing it in photoshop is that I copy the screencap into a 100x100 sized file and just use photoshop's transform tool to come up with a crop. Putting it in a 100x100 file helps because you can see what it will look like. Most people find that a crop that is slightly off center is more visually appealing than one that is centered. Mostly just play around and pick something you like. You are the one who will be looking at the icons mostly, so it is important that you like them.

Then from there about the only effects needed really are going to be stuff to improve upon the coloring or quality. It also depends on if you are working with anime or live action as well. For anime style, at most you may just need a bit of levels or brightness to make the colors look more like they should and possibly some sharpening. Often the sharpening built in is too much, so if that is the case, duplicate your crop and sharpen that and adjust opacity so it sharpens without overdoing the effect. For live action you may need to do more drastic color improvements because they often have incredibly dark lighting. I'd get into that, but I suck with live action screencaps, so you may just want to check a tutorial for the basic premise of what to do even if it's a photoshop tutorial and then play around with stuff and see how you can duplicate it.

Don't mess with the colors unless your screencaps suck and the coloring is off or too dark. People seem to love doing that in icons, and it honestly looks like garbage. You won't get complaints about what I mentioned above unless you overdo with brightness or sharpening. RP icons are not meant to be artistic, the are meant to show what the character looks like and their expression so basically overall you don't need to do much more than come up with a nice crop unless you are working with crap lighting or quality.

hi, anon;

general icon-making advice is pretty much exactly what i was going for! i just put in the program i use just in case there's anything specific i need to know about it/tricks and such if there are any. so this was pretty much perfect for me <3

thank you for your time and detailed response! i already had a good idea about some of these things, but it's helpful to see them put into words and laid out for me like this, particularly the but about how to handle sharpening without overdoing it. i may dig around for more specific tutorials later (for messing with lighting and such), but for now, this is a pretty good start. I appreciate it!

...bit*

oh, dear.

008

Re: cropping icons

op

no subject