Photoshop 7 Sig making tutorial

[Assertn]

hey, if you dont mind....i think im bored enough to add in a very simple effect trick that i think alot of people would like to use to touch up their screencaps for sigs and wallpapers.....this is something ive seen on some really nice wallpaper, and i decided to recreate it....its actually quite simple to do


HOW TO ENHANCE THE LOOK OF A SCREENCAPTURED ANIME PIC

1) obtain the pic

you can dl them easy enough, but if you want your own, and have windows media player, all you need to do is press ctrl + i to save them as an image file


i chose to use this clean shot of jiraiya for this tutorial
i also went ahead and cropped the image using the crop tool (its that square shaped tool thing with the slash through it)


2) crop the pic (note that if the pic you are cropping is the background layer, then you need to duplicate it first and crop the duplicated layer instead)

there's different ways of doing it, but if you want to get in the habit of doing it the PROFESSIONAL way, then i suggest using the path tool. (its the pen shaped tool near the text one) before you start, make sure in the options window (the horizontal one at the top) has the second option, which is the pen shape in front of a box, enabled. Now you just click to place points and a path is created to connect them. If you click and drag, you can create "bezier" curves, which is definitely a beautiful thing. Once the path is made and connected back to the start, then in bottom of the paths window click the 3rd button (it looks like a dotted circle line) and it will turn the path into a selection, then you can hit ctrl+shift+i to inverse selection and del to delete it.


i was quick with the cropping for the tutorial, but if you want you can zoom in alot and use the spacebar to help drag the image around while you are drawing the path.


3) add the pic to the background image (or vice versa)

you can just drag the layer from the layer window to another pdf if they are seperate, but make sure to keep the cropped image on its own layer


i was lazy so i just took the original screencap and blurred it alot as my bg. This adds a really nice depth effect.


4) duplicate and blur the cropped image

layer > duplicate layer will do the job for ya
then make sure the higher of the 2 duplicated layers is selected, and apply a generous guassian blur filter (filter > blur > guassian blur)


for my example i used a blur radius of 3.2 pixels, but it all depends on the size of the image, and how much of an effect you want to the original pic.


5) finally, specify blending mode


the blue arrow points to where you can change the blending mode of a layer. Just select the layer you blurred in step 4 and set the mode to something different. try each mode to see what they do. Personally, i think for this effect darken and overlay provide the best results.


i used overlay, and this is the final result. While darken is great for emphasizing the black outlines and creating more of a cel shaded look, i prefered the more vivid color results of overlay for this image.


thats all there is to it. I tried to elaborate enough for ps noobs to follow along, but let me know if anything is confusing. good luck!

[Forgotten]

Wow , this trick pwns