bjornwilde

A quick tutorial on a method I came across for how to make clear icons from muddy or dark screenshots and images. Enter at your own risk, thar be medium sized images behind the cut...

So you've found an image you'd really like to use, but it is so dark or muddy in lighting that making an icon from it is pointless becuase you end up with something that looks more like a black square than anything else? Fear not! There is hope!

First step is to find a good sized image. You can work with smaller images, but you have more wiggle room the larger the image. I would guess at least 800 pixels is heading in the right direction.

Now open that sucker up in Photoshop, PS Elements, Pixlr (an online photo editor run by Autodesk, very much like PS but free!), or which ever photo editing software you have/like.

Let's work with this bad boy, from Netflix's Daredevil:

Before you start weeping at your lot in life or question your choice of canon (did they really need to film so darkly?), head to Levels! I'm reasonably certain any photo editing software will have this function. In PS it is found in the Image menu: Image -> Adjustments -> Levels

You should get something like this:

Key things to look at are that red circle and the red arrow. That red circle is where we want to start. It is a slider and if you grab it and move it around, the image will become lighter or darker; lighter if you move it towards the left and darker if moved to the right. The wedge that I have circled adjusts the highlights of the image. The middle one will adjust the midtones, and the one all the way to the left will adjust the shadows. The graph looking bit is a representation of the color data of the file, where there is black, there is color. At the least, slide the wedges to where there is some black.

Let's take a look:

Wait, there is a masked vigilante in that picture!

Now you could just play with the image sliders as is, but if you are working with an image that has a color dominate that you don't like, say they used a blue filter to make pretend it's nighttime, you will want to play with the sliders in each color channel. To do that, go to that red arrow and select the drop down menu you get, each option will be a color channel and the sliders only affect that channel you have selected.

Here's the above picture with each channel manipulated individually:

Hrrmm... still kind of muddy. Now here, I like to click okay and then open levels again and play with the midtones:

Much better. Now you may notice the background, especially the lighter spots, are looking weird and blown out. That is okay and why we want to work with as large an image as we can. Once we reduce the image to an icon, that stuff disappears like magic. See?

Here's another example, to show how much this can save a life.

Who can be in this? I can't see anything...

Oh, it's Claire...but the walls and color blending look horrible now.

Well, maybe not so bad once I shrink it down. (To be honest, I might run this through levels or Brightness & Contrast (In the Image menu also) again at this size just to lighten it up a bit more.)

So there you have it. Levels are great and good, and coupled with the magic of shrinking images to hide horrible things, can change your life.

In the interests of full disclosure, I did learn this technique from someone who made icons but I can't remember where I saw it, Tumblr maybe?