Excuse me if I've not been too quick in my answer, but that was a question that required a detailed response, and I needed to find the appopiate moment to write it. You're not the first one to ask that: in
this post I tried to answer a similar question by Kaiser Franz, stating which were my principal guidelines or my overall method when making a leaderpic. But I suppose thet what you want to know is the proper mechanics of the process, don't you?
As I said in that post, I work with Photoshop (a pretty outdated version of it, but it suits my needs, so it's ok for me). Let's suppose we have a good quality image, and we know which part of it is going to appear in our final leaderpic.
First of all I trim the image to get a square image framing the personage's head and part of his shoulders. I always work with the image in the original size, because once shrunk to the game size, I find it just impossible to do anything with so small an image; whenever you enlarge it to work with it, you can only see a mess of pixels :wacko: .
Second step: if the image is not in black & white, I change it to this mode (When I first started to do these pics, I still tried whenever possible to profit from good quality colored images to make the final pic. This is what I did with Roth's pic, and that is why it looks so dark and different from the other ones, but in other cases the result was better, like with the brits Evelyn Wood and Wolseley), and then apply the auto-contrast tool to the whole image. This is also an important concept to achieve a good-looking final result: images have to be well contrasted (as I explained in my reply to Kaiser Franz). To finish this step, turn the image to RGB mode to do the colouring.
Third step: now we have a square B&W image, well contrasted and in big size (enough to work with it in any case) in RGB mode. We can start to colour it. i work with the "mask" tool (don't know if you're familiar with photoshop), encircling the areas wich are going to have applied a same colour onto them (for example, red cuffings and medals). This way, i don't have to worry about colouring outlimits. I colour using the "brush" tool, with opacity 20% and in mode "soft light" or "overlay", so I can control precisely the desired degree of colouring I wish to achieve.
After colouring, and sometimes intermingled with it, I correct lights and shadows (the auto-contrast tool is rarely enough to achieve a satisfactory result) using the black, white and degrees of grey among them to graduate transitions and intensities of light and shadow.
By far, the hardest part in this process is the face, which regrettably is also the most important one. I have to proceed very carefully here, almost like a painter would do and shrinking the image with the mousewheel constantly to control what will the final result look like in its proper size.
Fourth step: now we have a (hopefully
) nicely-looking, coloured square-framed image in RGB mode. Now I'd proceed to paint (with the brush tool in normal mode and opacity 100%) the images silouette in a light grey colour. after that, i would roughly "trap" the image with its grey contour with a mask, and then i'd open a prepared archive wich is a plain green (RGB 0,255,0) square, 40pix width x 43 pix height and resolution 72 pix/inch.
I look the to the original image size, and enlarge the green square to match its dimensions. Then, I just drag our selection from the original image to the green square an drop it, moving it around to get it well-fitted with the "move" tool. Now we can save and close the original image and forget about it.
Fifth step: shrink the pic to the game size (as stated above). Now is when I can see if the final result is decent-looking enough. Let's suppose it is so. Now, some interlacing will have happened between the geen background and the grey contour of the pic. With the "pencil" tool, in minimal size, normal mode and opacity 100%, I proceed now to do the final touches in green (RGB 0,255,0) and light grey, and now I just have to save the image in BMP and PNG mode (to post it in the forums).
This process, with a good enough base image, takes me about 30-45 minutes.
I hope this will be of some help to you, but please bear in mind that english is not my native language and that my typing abilities are just pathetic
o .
PD: Don't hesitate to ask me to clarify any further points!
