Making Icons with Photoshop

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El Scumbago
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Making Icons with Photoshop

Post by El Scumbago »

Until I got some hints from Angelus about how to make icons in Photoshop, I hadn't found a single tutorial in the web. Well, actually I did, but none was about Photoshop. So, since I learned, I thought it'd be useful to post the how-to in the forum, step by step. Here it is:

1) Open the CS, drag the item of interest in the Render window and press PrintScreen to take a pic.

2) Open the MS Paint, hit Edit and then paste. The pic of the CS with the item in the Render window should appear, so save it as a JPG or BMP (whatever suits you).

3) Open Photoshop and load the pic. Then go to File->New, and create a square and transparent background (the option about transparency is further down from the point where you type the size).

4) Having both the CS pic and the transparent image open at the same time, resize the CS pic to match the image you made.

5) With the magic wand, select all of the grey areas of the CS pic, then hit "select inverse" (so that instead of the grey areas you select the item only). Then drag that selected item into the transparent image.

6) Again, use the magic wand to select the transparent areas of the image and "select inverse" to select the item only. Go to the "layer" panel (the last one from the panels on the right side of the screen), and hit the tab that says "channels". The color channels should now appear, and in the lower part of the panel you should see, among others, a circle inside a box. Hit it (it creates an Alpha channel for the whole image while excluding the item).

7) Almost done. Resize the image to 32x32 (that's the size of Morrowind icons) and save it as Targa (tga). Then close Photoshop and add your icon to the object you want.

8 - optional) For your convenience, after saving the icon open the DDS converter, select it and...convert it to dds.


It should be fairly easy and understandable for anyone who has a basic knowledge of Photoshop. I hope it helps a bit.
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Doxas
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Post by Doxas »

As for the step two, you can simply make that step in Photoshop, so you could easily avoid opening MS Paint and need of saving file you wont need later.

Just after step 1, insted of second step:
* Open Photoshop, go to File->New and press ok (whatever button that creates new file). After new file window pop-ups press Crtl+V (Paste). Now you have printed screen image and can proceed to step 3.

Photoshop automatically recognizes and sets the size of saved in RAM image, so you dont have to edit any size values when creating new file.
Just my two cents :)
horodnicdragos
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Post by horodnicdragos »

Or, get blender, import the object you want to make the icon for, place it wherever you want in the camera sight, go to render options, set size x=32, y=32, select Targa format, press F12 to render and then F3 to save the file. Later on you can convert the tga to dds. This is how I do it and in case you think it won't create alpha bended tga's then you're wrong. Everything works as it's supposed to be. :) Enjoy making icons.
El Scumbago
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Post by El Scumbago »

As I said, this was a tutorial for Photoshop.
horodnicdragos
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Post by horodnicdragos »

You still use photoshop to convert the tga to dds. :P I just thought that in blender it is much more simple.
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Gez
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Post by Gez »

You don't need Photoshop to convert TGA to DDS. NVidia has several tools in free downloads, at the same place they put their DDS plugin for Photoshop you can find nvdxt.

I made a simple batch file, entitled dds.bat, with the following content:

Code: Select all

:: Making textures with mipmaps
nvdxt -file *.tga -dxt5 -outdir .\textures
nvdxt -file *.bmp -dxt5 -outdir .\textures
nvdxt -file *.png -dxt5 -outdir .\textures
nvdxt -file *.jpg -dxt5 -outdir .\textures

:: Making icons, bookarts, and other non-3D textures
nvdxt -file *.tga -dxt3 -nomipmap -outdir .\icons
nvdxt -file *.bmp -dxt3 -nomipmap -outdir .\icons
nvdxt -file *.png -dxt3 -nomipmap -outdir .\icons
nvdxt -file *.jpg -dxt3 -nomipmap -outdir .\icons

:: A pause to see if there are error messages
:: before the command line window gets closed.
pause
No need for Photoshop. And it's batch processing, I can generate thousands and thousands of finished DDS textures and icons by just putting the files to be converted in my "image workshop" folder, where that batch file is, click on dds.bat, and let the magic operate!
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