Photoshop Journey #4
Today I’ve chosen a tutorial courtesy of Phlearn. The President and Co-Founder, Aaron Nace, does a very good job on all his tutorials. I would consider the episode, How to Create an iOS 8 Icon in Photoshop, for beginners – even I can do it. Checkout their YouTube channel, there are dozens of really good, easy to follow, tutorials.
I followed the steps in the tutorial using the rounded rectangle tool, a clipping mask, created a custom gradient, added text then finally finished off with a shadow effect. I made a few changes along the way; selecting my own colours and creating my own logo but otherwise followed the steps. That’s my iOS 8 icon at the top of this post.
Learned some new Photoshop techniques but ran into some problems too.
When Aaron created the rounded rectangle, he opened up a Properties window and made further adjustments. I couldn’t find that window no matter how hard I tried. A Google search didn’t help, confirming my belief that Photoshop is just cryptic. After an hour, decided to figure it out on my own, without the Properties window.
Near the end of the tutorial, Aaron suggests looking at your icon on a white background to see what your work would look like on an iOS screen. I had a shadow around the original 1000px by 1000px canvas even though the drop-shadow effect was turned off?!? Another thing I couldn’t figure out but it really didn’t effect the final product.
Neither of these two issues caused too much of a problem and I was able to finish the project. The only reason I bring it up is that Photoshop can be so damn quirky. I’ve found many Photoshop tutorials are like this, although rare from Phlearn. Chances are, I have some obscure setting not quite right. It’s all part of the Photoshop mystique.
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