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☞ icon critique meme
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♠ reply to this post with your username and/or journal you post your icons at. along with that, post 5-12 icon samples, so everyone can give you some of their thoughts too.
♡ reply to people's ( even people that you aren't familiar with an outsider's perspective is good ) comments with critiques and opinions on their icons. anonymous comments are enabled and ip logging is disabled, if you feel you need to use that option.
♣ try to be polite, but at the same time honest. the purpose of this meme is to be helpful, so any wank will be deleted.
♢ pimp this out in your journal and/or icon community, etcetera.
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I'm freakishly new at this, so any help at all would be appreciated! I focus on icons for rp journals, so...yeah. I make my own screencaps, crop, mess with the contrast/levels, and that's about it at this point. ._____.
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Right now, otherwise, these look like flat crops.
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Thanks, I'm going to try to break photoshop over my knee now. .___.
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And my advice is to look up some icon making tutorials, to show you how to play with layers.
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Thank you so much! I knew my friends were lying when they said they were 'perfect'. xD
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I like your cropping and you capture expressions very well -- the cropping on Scar (9, 10, 11), I really like those and I think you should try doing more of that off-to-the-side look since you seem to center your subject a lot. Icons like 2 and 6, for instance, you could shift the subject over to the side a bit more to make a half-crop; not all or even most of the subject's face or body has to be contained in the icon. Using negative space can make things interesting, as well.
You mentioned using levels and contrast -- I'd suggest layering on some selective colouring, and using fill colour layers set on soft light or exclusion (a dark blue fill layer put on Exclusion gives a really nice peach-pink skin tone to a lot of anime characters) to get the colouring you want. If you stick with brightening/contrasting only, the icons can look more like bases rather than finished products. I'm actually partial to using curves myself to brighten an icon instead of using the brightness/contrast, too, although sometimes I'll use both -- I find the Curves adjustment gives better control, though.
If I were to pick out your best one in this batch, I would pick 8, especially on the colouring front. It's nice and bright -- though I'd still suggest playing around with more adjustment layers a bit -- and I think if you combined the colouring you did there with the crops you've used for 9/10/11, you'd be well on your way.
Anyway, yeah. XD; Hope that helps? ♥ Good luck!
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I did a little test with some images and found out that the screencaps weren't bad, I just saved them wrong (that's a big relief to me, since I've been using a pretty good program to screencap, and the thought that I'd managed to mess that up too....well.... .______. Not to mention I prefer doing every bit of work myself, even if it comes out worse for it. *stupid*).
This is how it was supposed to look. (http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/HisaKurozawa/exmp2.png)
And then what ended up happening. (http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/HisaKurozawa/exmp1.png)
That's probably why the bottom ones look better. I still saved them as .jpgs, but I saved it at the highest quality. The top ones are more recent, and the first icons I've made since, ah, getting the full version of photoshop. I think I got careless.
I wasn't using PokemonSnap! logic, wut?Yeah, I tend to get kind of paranoid that I'll end up with not enough face/expression/whatever, so I center like a moron. xDI'm generally afraid of using layers, but I think I'm going to make myself learn now. And yes, that was freakishly helpful, thank you so much! ♥♥♥
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I find that if the subject -- especially the face -- fills most of the icon, it looks a bit odd to the eye, although that doesn't mean center crops can't work either. :3 But with partial-face crops, you can use it to emphasize the character's expression, too, since then you're looking at just the most important part of the features instead of the whole face.
Oh but -- speaking of .jpgs, I think another thing that can help up the quality is if you save your icons as .png. The quality difference isn't immense and sometimes you can't even notice, but it does help in other cases.
Layers are a lifesaver once you get the hang of them.
GLAD I COULD HELP THOUGH.
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I think my eyes are broke. .___. Most of the time I prefer for the whole face to show, but for it to be slightly off, if that makes sense? Otherwise it annoys me.
YOU SAID THAT JUST AS I FOUND A GUIDE TO THOSE xD &hearts You're awesome, hon.
OH:
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That one looks good to me! Although I might use the sharpen function on the base layer to make it a little clearer? It's not grainy, but it is somewhat blurry. But yeah, the image quality is just fine. ♥
Monitors are annoying though alkjds; I've re-calibrated mine like ten times and I still don't know if it's correct. @__@
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YOU ASKED FOR IT
Hint: I think he's stoned.
Re: YOU ASKED FOR IT