Okay I'm prefacing this with a small disclaimer, these are all little tricks that have helped me, but figuring out your own style is probably going to bring out way better results than sticking to someone else's method. Experiment and see what works while still keeping in mind general guidelines about image placement and so on! I know that Lucathia's guide is good, but the style described in there didn't work for me in regards to image editing, so I picked up other methods. This is a tiny thing I'm trying to do to help in case other people have similar problem. I super hope this doesn't sound arrogant (I'm not the Hottest Shit...) or disrespectful toward Lucathia, my idea is really just to help with a few more additional tip, not for this to be standard procedure.

Also I am only going to cover image editing and coloring, pretty much, that's really just it.

CROPPING
Cropping is something that really is up to people's each personal taste, so I'm not going to say how to do it but instead just suggest something that makes it easier to adjust the image around.



What I do is open the image and instead of already deciding exactly how to crop it, i resize it to something like, say 90 pixel of height depending on how the image is (like if it's a full body obviously do something bigger like 130, if it's a close up to 67, etc. YOU PICK THE THING YOURSELF BASICALLY USE YOUR JUDGEMENT). Then just copy the image and crop it to the card number you want, in this case let's go for 7 because why not.

The image is obviously bigger than the card, so you can just move it around and adjust it wherever the hell I feel like! Just move it around until it's on a position you like.



I do editing for the images after i put them all on the psd so I can check the consistency better, so after this it's all good all copy/paste everywhere. AND HERE WE HAVE ALL THE IMAGES PUT ON WOW


what a fascinating step

COLORING
And now we start on the actual image editing. BEFORE picking the deck color, I drag a bunch of adjustement layers from a psd i did when I started making decks. You can find the psd in question here, and it contains 4 adjustement layers: Curves1, Hue/Saturation 1, Brightness/Contrast 1 and Levels 1. They don't wrok (i sometimes take out the brightness/contrast or saturation layer, depending) for all images and further adjustement on single cards are gonna be necessary, but they usually give a nice first touch! Simply drag them below the "dark color" layer on our deckmaking psd, and make sure they're in the same order as they are in coloring.psd

in the case of this deck, brightness/contrast layer is unnecessary since it makes the entire deck too dark, so I took it out. It's still a little darker, so when that happens, doubleclick on this icon and drag the middle little arrow a little bit to your left, until you're satisfied. For those who don't know how levels (this is the name of the adjustement) work, the black arrow ups or lowers the black/darker colors, the gray one ups or lowers (depending where you move it) general contrast/darkness, and the white one changes the light. I'm not good at explaining but seriously just dick around with these three arrows and you'll see!

I typically pick the deck color AFTER this process because that way i can eyedrop dark and light colors from the images themselves (after they're prettified with this fist round of adjustement!), so the deck color can match properly. Now, picking the colors is vastly subjective, so the only thing I'm going to say is that decks look nicer if there's a certain amount of contrast between the dark and light color. If they're too close to each other they blend and they don't look as shiny. But that's also up to each individual taste!


wow such contrast. very colors.

Are we done now? No man this train is headed to hell we can't leave. I mean-- no not yet we need to adjust each single card now, so the deck can be all consistent and pretty. Now! I'm not going to go in order since I want to address blurry images first, so we're gonna edit 18 first.

This is a pretty easy step really, what i do is duplicate the layer (right click on the layer > duplicate). And then on the duplicated layer, I go to filter > sharpen > sharpen. The reason I do it on a duplicated layer rather than the same one is because that way I can change the opacity, so if it's too sharpened, I can lower it. Most often than not images just need a sharpened layer at 20% opacity or less, but sometimes images are very blurry and they need a higher opacity. For this one it's a 70 because that image is hella bad. I sharpened the first card too, and for that one the layer with sharp is put at just 13%, just to give you an example of how you have to work based on the single image.

Now, onto the image editing, we get to CARD 02. As you can see, this one is super yellow and orange. But our deck is blue! and it stands out with the other images! WHAT A TRAGEDY. What we do in this case is abuse the "color balance" feature. Go to Image > Adjustement > Color Balance. This image is very yellow and red, so we put the arrow on cyan/red a little more toward cyan, and the yellow/blue a little more toward blue. Again, drag them until you feel it's okay.



Pretty huge difference, right? Now the only thing that stands out is that the image is way darker than the rest, so we go to image > adjustements > levels. This is the same thing as earlier! In this case, we drag a little bit of the white, and a little bit of the gray arrow until we're satisfied. And once again duplicate and sharpen. This time, it's at 11%



The process for each image is the same. 03 is too light, so we darken it with levels and then dragging the black arrow a little to the right. The image isn't too red, but there's still a bit of contrast with the previous too, so for this one I'm gonna color balance a bit too. And again duplicate and sharpen... (this one to 33%)

This basically goes on for each image. You just use your judgement to change -- it's just, like, brightness/contrast can't do a whole lot, so using a few other tricks can actually make a huge, huge difference. A quick note, for images like 05, where colors are washed out and grays sometimes a combination of using both the dark arrow and the yellow arrow works miracles. This is because you can up the shadows and the lights! Just be careful not to make the image blinding



Anyway that is it! I won't go over retouch for every single image since, like I said, it really depends on the image and just fiddling around is the best way to do things.

Here is the finished result for this deck specifically:



there's one last thing I added to bring the colors all together, but it's a thing I picked up from ceesoo so I am not sure if it's already in our deckmaking doc. And either way I totally would not be able to explain it in english, so instead, have this deck's psd so you can See Stuff.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, since i'm really not good at explaining, just tell me and I'll try to answer them! I hope this is useful and again I'm sorry if it sounds arrogant, I just thought I'd share Stuff just in case people aren't aware of these features! Again this isn't a HEY, EVERYONE, DO IT LIKE THIS, it's just an additional help for things! Definitely not a end and be all for deckmaking, as I said before, trying to find your own style is the best thing!