Why is iconning so much harder than vidding?

[frayadjacent]

Maybe I have no internal sense of composition. I know I rarely brighten my icons enough. Also, with vidding I'm much more excited to learn the technical skills needed to do a decent job. When I icon I just want to hurry up and have something good without having to look at photoshop tutorials or whatnot.

Anyway, I've forever wanted an Anya "I'm so pleased" icon because that phrase, with her voice saying it, is always in my head. So I made a couple today and they are meh. It's hard to see her face -- 100x100 is so tiny! But if I cropped more you wouldn't see the money and her funny hand gestures.

  ETA: 

I'm not fishing for complements! If anything, I'm fishing for patient explanations as to what I'm doing wrong. Maybe it's my cap choice.

(BTW, that first one uses a texture that someone else made -- goodbyebird, was that you? I'm sorry I didn't take note to properly give credit! Not that I'm doing much with these.)

ETA: I worked a bit more on the second one -- brightening it up around her face, fiddling with the background, tilting the text, and I do like this better. Huh.

Comments

[goodbyebird]

oh oh, with sharpening older shows especially, I tend to do some skin smoothing with the blur tool set to about 7%, on the full size cap.

Three other Trouble With Sharpening Tips:
1. Icon in 200x200, and then make it 100x100, fix what looks blurry/washed out after.
2. Use selective color, go to gray and up the blacks. Mask out stuff you don't want darkened, but this is brilliant for contours and eyes, etc.
3. You don't have to apply your sharpening to the entire icon. Just erase or use the smoothing tool on what looks jagged.

Sharpening is SO HARD tho. Gives me trouble still.

[frayadjacent]

Weird, one time I iconned in 200x200 and the results were horribly over-sharpened looking. I think that part of that was that Photoshop doesn't play nice with my retina screen on my Mac, so everything looks tiny. That's why I was using 200x200, but it still was pretty small on my screen. I've since discovered that handy old zoom feature. ;)

That's really good to know about the blur on the full size cap. I will try to remember that!

Thanks for all these tips! You are awesome.

And seriously, Buffy, that is NOT mom hair. (Though she does dress the most like a grown up in S7, and I like it!)