(no subject)

[teyla]

All right, so as of now, there will be no more crossposting to LJ. One of these days, I will go through my LJ and delete all my extremely personal crap. Everything else will stay up. All my content has been imported to DW, so I'm not losing anything. I feel good about this way of handling it, so yay. Thanks to everyone who gave input!

I've been talking to tinny about icons, and because I was stuck on my fic, and quite enjoyed the new Doctor Who episode, I made some 10x01 icons.

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10

Crit, feedback, comments, all welcome!

Has anyone been watching Line of Duty? I'm mostly watching it for Paul Higgins, who played Jamie on The Thick of It. His English accent is painful. He's trying so hard, but as someone on my dash on Tumblr said, it's like watching undercover Jamie acting like he imagines Englishmen act. His character on Line of Duty is an UTTER CREEP, though, so I'm having some discomfiting dissonance with how much I love Jamie and how much I hate ... I think his name is Hilton? ACC Hilton. Blech.

Thandie Newton is playing the lead, though, and she's great. I had a huge crush on her back when she was playing Dr. Carter's girlfriend on ER. Her character on Line of Duty is a bit shady, but man, I know where my sympathies lie. Everyone else on that show is even more of a creep. Oh, gritty British crime shows.

Comments

[makamu]

Yep, fellow Line of Duty watcher here... And I have to say: while I agree that there are shady characters aplenty on that show, I like watching it? Besides, I have this weird idea of Hastings (Adrian Dunbar's character) being sent to the police afterlife of Life on Mars/ Ashes to Ashes , and Gene Hunt being very upset because "you were supposed ta be dead the last time!" ;) Apologies for my weird humour :)

[seraphina_snape]

Nice icons! I really love #5, and #2 is too cute!

[rusty_armour]

Wonderful icons! It's impossible to pick my absolute favourite. I think I like 2, 7 and 10 best.

[tinny]

Ooooh, awesome! Those are great!

The lighting is excellent, and your masking is very good, too.

I especially like 1 and 8 and 9, because they have that kinda flat matte coloring that I personally love. But the less flat ones (5 and 7 especially) look great to me, too. The composition in both 5 and 10 is great.

One thing that you might want to look into is sharpening artefacts around the masked characters. It's not very pronounced in your icons, the only one I really notice it in is #3.

What I always do is smooth out the artefacts at the very end. What you do is you create a stamp copy of your layers (if you need step by step explanations, let me know), then blur that copied layer with a simple Blur filter. Set the whole mask to black. Then go over the places you think look pixelated with a small white brush. -> blur only the places where you see blocky things.

I have an action that does this, if you're interested. Do you even use Photoshop?

(Also, just because that one took me *years* to find, Photoshop has a "Refine Mask" command (CTRL-ALT-R). It works on both mask layers and active selections. But it's not that versatile outside of single selections, so ymmv.)