Winner's tutorial, Challenge #119, by pensnest

[pensnest]

This icon was made in Photoshop CS5 on a Mac. It uses Curves, mostly.

I thought one of the most interesting things about this challenge was the variety in cropping. I did several different ones myself, and obviously this full-length one was the most successful.



The first thing I did was to add a Curves layer, which upped the contrast between figure and background.





Next up, the old-fashioned approach! A colour fill layer in 10234c, a rich dark blue, set to Exclusion. This emblued the picture.



Another Curves layer upped the contrasts again, and made it bluer, which I don't really understand but which I liked, so that was all right.





I did a Merged layer (shift+cmd+alt+E) to get it all on the top, then applied a Gaussian Blur filter set to 3.2.



This, I set to Soft Light. I like a Gaussian blurred layer, it seems to add a luminous quality to most pictures. Finally, I have some (fairly huge) cloud brushes from Gorjuss, so I applied a bit of cloud at upper left and lower right. I think they're probably in ffffff, and set on Normal at 85%, but I didn't note down the colour I used.

To show you where the brushes are, here's a shot of the brushes layered above a black background.



Here's the Layers palette:



And, the finished icon.