just mess a round a bit, i got pretty good without being taught how to do much... its pretty darn easy once you get the hang of it... just start putting images together...
use the wand to get rid of the old background of the pic, change the tollerance... lower makes it so that less is picked up, higher makes it so more colors that are close are picked up, then use the transform, scale button under edit to change the size, umm... find a few backgrounds on photobucket, anything will do realy, and set them over eachother, deleting some of one of them, and changing the Opacity, so that its more or less see through... um... text will take some getting used to... but theres not much to start with, so you might wanna download some... um... ya thats about all i can say right now... it would be so much easier if i had it in front of me right now XD
It’s pretty easy, I mean I did it with some help of tuts after that you can pretty much just blow yourself away with all those settings there, search for some tuts, they will teach you all you need to know!
Not really, but I’m one of the more knowledgeable people on here, so I might be able to help if you have specific questions.
Just tell me basic stuff.
Hmm.. Alright. Lemme explain some of the tools and options you have then. I have CS2 so it might differ quite a bit from the version you have, but I’m sure it will be of some help.
Below I have a picture with some of the more important tools numbered. I’ll tell you what they do, of course some will be pretty self explanatory.
01. This is the marquee tool, it allows you to select certain parts of your picture. You’ll notice in the corner there is a little black triangle. This means you can right click to gain more options to use, such as elliptical selections instead of square ones.
02. This is the move tool, simple. Just allows you to move layers around on the canvas.
03. Lasso tool. This is incredible useful, it allows you to select parts of the image like the marquee tool, except you can go completely freehand with it. You’re not bound to shapes. If you right click you also have the option of choosing the polygonal and magnetic lassos. The first allows you to make straight lines in order to select weird shapes effectively. The magnetic tool actually guides the lines along a certain part of the image based on pixel color. So if you’ve got a bright blue shape on a weird dark background, it’ll be easy to select the blue shape with this.
04. The magic wand, it select pixel colors that are like in nature. This is great for rendering stock images that have a bright single color background. You can simply click the background and it’ll select everything of the same color. You can also adjust how well it selects like colors by using the tolerance option located at the top of the screen while this tool is selected.
05. This is the crop tool. It’s pretty self explanatory. You use it to crop images to a certain size. You can also use it to rotate the cropped image automatically by rotating the selection with your mouse.
06. Brush tool. Self explanatory again. It’s a brush, much like in paint. You can set custom shapes and play around with the opacity and mode to create cool effects. But I never really got good with brushing techs. You can right click it to get the pencil tool.
07. Clone Stamp tool. Pretty fun to use and great for getting rid of text that might have been spread across the image you’re working on. Right click to get the pattern stamp tool which will brush a pattern of your choice over the image. Using the clone stamp can be tricky though. You’ve got to make sure the colors, saturation, and brightness are nearly the same. Because it literately just clones certain parts of the image for you. Select the area you want cloned by holding ctrl and click the area and brush away. Adjust the brush size to determine how much is cloned.
08. Eraser. This is pretty much your best friend if you’re rendering images. If you right click you can select the magic eraser and background eraser tools. I’m not sure what the background eraser really does, but the magic eraser is like the magic wand, except instead of simply selecting the area it erases the area.
09. Paint Bucket tool. It’s exactly the same as the fill tool in paint. No difference, until you right click and select the gradient tool at least. That allows you to put a variety of color effects onto the image. It can be used to fade from one color to another in a bunch of ways or it can be used to fade multiple colors together, like a rainbow if you’re into that stuff.
10. Blur tool. It allows you to blur the image, adjust the strength and mode to get different effects. Right clicking gets you the sharpen and smudge tools. Sharpen is self explanatory. The smudge tool allows you to kinda smudge parts of the image together. You can get some cool effects if you know how to use it. The Sephiroth sig I have used this tool to kinda blur the edges into the rest of the image.
11. Text tool. Once again, self explanatory. If you right click you can get a vertical type tool and the horizontal and vertical mask text tools. Not sure what the latter two are about. Never really used them.
12. Shape tool. It allows you to make shapes. =D Right clicking nets you a variety of shapes to use from rounded rectangles to circles.
13. Dropper tool. This thing allows you to steal a pixel color from the image and use it on your color pallet. Great for matching colors to your images. Right clicking gets the the color sampler and measure tools which I didn’t even know existed until just now.
14 - Zoom tool. once again, self explanatory. Just use it to zoom in and out of an image. Also allows you to bring it to it’s actual size or fit the image on the screen. Very, very useful when creating things.
15 & 16 - This is the color pallet. Pretty self explanatory. You select the colors you want to use. This is also the two colors that determine your gradient colors.
And those are what I consider to be the basics. I can’t really help you out on anything else unless you specifically ask because I’ll have no idea what I’m trying to explain to you.
And what Killa suggested is very important. Search for tutorials. It’s something I never really have the time to do. All the signatures I make, as good as they might look, and pretty damn basic because I don’t know how to use brushing techs and I don’t have a complete understanding of how things work. Tutorials are your best friend.
Animated gifs are created in Image Ready which will come with CS2
And I make my sigs mostly by combining several images and renders together, adjusting the blends on them, opacity, ect. I use fractal renders, C4D renders, and some basic brushing to create backgrounds.
Color schemes - You have to know what colors go with what, so have in mind 2 colors that you want to use as main colors, more than 2 main colors will probably look tacky.
Style- Come up with your own style, this wont come right away, but eventually you will learn too.
Tutorials- Use em till you get really good, they help the most.
Last edited 29 Feb 2008 05:14 pm by anti-moviecodec.
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