Levels Tut with Sam Carter

[seleneheart]

This is for the use of those of us who have Photoshop Elements, so can't get the benefit of either curves or the color balance commands in many tutorials. But we do have levels and that's what this tut is about. I have Elements 4.0.

Turning this screen shot into this icon:

	Crop, sharpen, whatever. I usually run it through the auto enchancements, just to see if they help any. In this case, I just used the autocontrast, because the others turned the color very blue.
Now the levels. Sorry, I didn't pay attention to the actual numbers, because I was just playing and didn't plan on doing this. But there's a screen shot later. :)	Duplicate the base. Enhancement > Adjust lighting > Levels. Do one color per layer. First layer, Red level, set to "soft light" 100%
	Duplicate base, do not drag it, just leave it where it is, so that it is between the red layer and the base layer. Same procedure, except this time, use on the Green levels, set to "overlay" 100%
	Duplicate base, and again, just leave the duplicate there. Blue levels, set to "soft light" 100%
Screen shot of the levels layers:	Duplicate the file, and merge the layers of the duplicate. (I did this because I was going to paste it later, and I didn't want to merge the lower levels in the actual icon. Yeah, weird. There's probably a better way to do this in other versions of Photoshop.)
	Go back to the original and paste this texture, (don't know where it's from, got it from another tut, and that author didn't know either) set to "screen" 80%
	Paste your duplicate merged file, set to "softlight" 65%
	I used the eyedropper to pick out a dark brown color, #2d0502. Font is Old Script, 30pt
	New layer, stroke 1px border on the inside, in the same color as the text. Done!

Resources

Comments

[cocoajava.livejournal.com]

You wrote a tutorial!

I'll just sit over here and be really, really impressed. The icon is gorgeous.

[seleneheart]

Thanks, glad you like it! I don't write tuts very often because they're a pain in the ass, plus sometimes I don't remember what I did. Luckily this was pretty simple.

[rakshi.livejournal.com]

Followed your tutorial as close as I could. And this is what I got! I did change a few things.. not many tho.

Wheee!



Thank you!! Great job!

[seleneheart]

It's very nice, love the colors on it!

[galateika.livejournal.com]

these look wonderful!