Making Icons using Photoshop CS' Premade Shapes

Yep here I am again giving you another tutorial. I hope this one will allow you to make your own icons so you can sell your icons to other people. Note that I do not go over everything in needs of making any icon. Also, I would not try and use photoshop shapes and sell them as icons because I'm sure there is some kind of copyright on them through Adobe. Let's get started!

Open up a 100x100 document for your icon.

Press "U" (This is the Custom Shape Tool) and in the drop down box at the top of Photoshop select the heart.

Draw a good sized heart on your canvas whilst holding the shift key to maintain a proportional heart.

In the color box at the top of Photoshop select a good red color. Here's mine:

Right click the layer and select "Rasterize Layer".

Now let's get into some nice blending options. This is what brings the icon to life in a way. Now note this is the effect I like on these type of icons. There are numerous different ways you can achieve a nice looking icon.

Tick "Inner Glow" and use the following settings:

Now tick "Stroke" and make a 1px stroke with a darker red color.

Great.. We have our icon now. Maybe we should add a highlight to it. Get out the "Elliptical Marquee Tool"

Draw a big circle so there is a curved selection over the heart and fill it with white on a new layer.

Great job. Now, CTRL + CLICK on the heart layer. This will select all the contents in the layer you just clicked. So in this case we have a heart selection.

Now we added a stroke to the heart shape so we're going to have to include that in our selection also. Right now we're one pixel away from it so go to "Select > Modify > Expand" and enter in 1 for one pixel.

Now let's get rid of that excess white we have around the heart. Go to "Select > Inverse" and this will select everything outside of the heart shape.

Make sure you have the white layer selected and hit the delete key.

Great!! Now we have white only on our heart shape.

Set the opacity percent level to something not to dark and not to light.. Just enough to make it seem like a highlight. Here's my finished product: