A little fight in you. I like that.
Signature Making MS Paint/Paintshop Pro/Photoshop 7
Tutorial was written well over two years ago. SUE ME. It still works though. Part of the tutorial was written by a friend without a website. >_>'Microsoft Paint
(Omg, yes you can make decent sets in paint wtf. :D)Okay, to make this way work. You'll have to start off with a huge picture in paint. Unless you have pixelation skillz. I'm using...a really large image of Kingdom Hearts 2.
Example of how large it needs to be With the selection tool, i'm picking the area of Sora's head and then the background. Cut, and then close that image.(New image)
Okay, new image.
Go to Image - Attributes and put a really small size in. 100x100 or something.
Paste your image, BUT IMPORTANT before the image is unselected move it up to the top right corner a bit. This will take some practice, but its the only way to get the image to look right without resizing too too much.
Now, when you're happy with this. Go back to Image - Attributes and set it to your sig size. 300x150 /500x100/whatever
Mine is like this.
Now, time to make it look good >:D
I'm using just the basic tools of paint to draw designs for it. .. Ookay.
Saving is the key here, if you save too big its blah.
If you save it badly, then it just looks stupid.
SAVE IT ONLY ONCE, YOU MUST BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU COME UP WITH. NO SAVING IT LATER.
Saving it twice on JPG will kill it.
.bmp is nice but saves too large. You can use that at a forum without image restraint.
Here is mine. Saved only once in .jpg
:o It looks good.END OF MICROSOFT PAINT TUTORIAL!
Paintshop Pro Tutorial
Written by Queenie.
So you want to learn how to make a signature picture with Paint Shop Pro? Well you came to the right place. In this tutorial, you'll be shown how to make a simple set. You don't have to have it exactly the way of this tutorial because making sets are all about creativity.
Step 1 > Open up a new document. Right now, we'll stick with 400px x 100px. Find a picture of your liking and crop it. Usually people would use the Magic wand.
And then you click around it like so.
After that is done, press delete.
If you're not satisfied with the picture, you can always zoom in and use your erase to take care of the detail.
Step 3 > Now that you made the necessary adjustments, you can click on your new document. Sometimes its customary to put one color, but we need some kind of creativity.
Copy (Ctrl + C) and paste (Ctrl + L) the picture, just like you would with text. See? Almost done.
Step 4 > Be creative. Discover what you can do with your program. And don't forget the power of layers, which its properties can be altered here.
And with a few more stuff being done, such as paintbrushes
and other ninfty things you can learn on photoshop to make the set prettier.
This is the result.
So ends the tutorial. =D
Final: Photoshop 7
(Can work in higher versions) YOU MUST KNOW HOW TO WORK THE TOOLS.....Oye, I really hate writing PS tutorials. But anyway, the image preparation will be short and sweet.
1. Extracting.
Never, EVERuse the magic wand. It, sucks.
The only thing it can be good for is pixelation. The reason that it is such a horrible tool for extracting normal images is, if the background is say a grey/white color and theres a grey/white shade on the character in your image.
Well, it takes the color also off your character which makes it look like hell.
The background eraser tool.. Very iffy, I have never used it. But I hear it is bad.
What I use is the Polygonal Lasso Tool.
Okay, start off at an easy part of your image. I'm using Sora from KH2 again, since his hair's easy to extract. x)
ALSO, MAKE SURE YOUR BACKGROUND LAYER IS NOT LOCKED. (THERE WILL BE A KEYPAD BY IT) If so, duplicate that layer and delete the background layer so when you extract it will be a grey checkerboard instead of your background color.
Repeat the process on each part of your image, untill complete.
(Some images may be time consuming)
You will NOT get it right the first time, so if you need to. Make a layer, fill it with black drag it under your image layer.
Zoom in, and if you see white pixels around the image. Fix that so your extraction is clean.
A real nice trick is, to extract it at the image orginal size.
Then resize AFTER you extract it cleanly. It makes it even better.
(Resizing in Photoshop - Image - Image Size *MAKE SURE ITS IN PIXELS!*)
Tada!
See? Nice and clean.
Now you can begin your background. I am going to make him a nice summery-sky sunset for it.
01: Change background to white.
02: Make layer, use a light blue/white gradient going vertically down.
(If you don't see it, right click the paintbucket)
03: Make second layer, get your paintbrush tool. With an orangey color, make several lines on the background. Now, smudge to blend. (DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT)
04: Another layer, use a muted yellow color and do the same thing, continue this for several layers using warm colors you'd see in a sunset.
Merge all the colors together. Duplicate and use the layer modes to make it good.
Or.
Forget all of that and find a stock image of a sunset image and vector it to make it anime-ish. ..(Is doing that)
Add a few brushes..
(Look it up on google..>_>!)
A few rectangles, a few lines... just make it look good.
If you think you overdid it, you over did it.
Thus why we use layers, to delete that nasty crap. :D
All I did was.
1. Layer of star brushes on overlay
. 2. Second layer of star brushes on normal, with a fade at the edge.
3. Added the Kingdom Hearts 2 Theme, Passion in romaji form at 3px with Times New Roman
4. Duplicated the Sora image, added a outerglow to the copy and the original.
Set the duplicate to soft light and moved it to the left a tad.
5. Used the eyedropper tool to pick out a color in the sunset and added a rectangle(s) with that color.
6. Wrote a lyric from the english version of passion on. Used drop shadow only on the word again.
7. Merged it down, added a white border.
8. Done! A simple, yet effective signature.
This signature ANYONE can make. Even someone who just started. The key is, to know your tools. (Knowing a few brush sites can't do anyharm either. ;P)
My result.
Thats it!
I will not write a tutorial using GIMP, or any other program. These are the most common programs ANYONE can obtain.