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View Full Version : Making signatures and avatars



FallenAngel411
03-24-2005, 05:26 AM
Well...how does everyone do it??? I'd love to make my own siggy and avatar, but I have no clue how. Is there some kind of software I have to download or something? Any advice would be much appeciated!

Cybele
03-24-2005, 05:35 AM
You need either paint shop pro or photoshop to make anything really decent. Both of which cost money. Look around on your computer, you may have a trial run of paint shop pro you haven't yet activated. I'll go find my blending tutorial...

Edit: Here it is...

You have to have Photoshop...I actually had a blending tutorial...I'm not very good at explaining things, but here goes.
Open photoshop, then open a new canvas (if you go for a sig, try about 400x150 pixels)
Open your image, go to the selection tool (the square thing in the upper left hand corner)
Then you should see a box that says feather toward the top and 0 px inside the feathering box. Put in an amount (I usually use about 30) and select the part of the image you want. The dotted square should turn into a circle. Then go to edit, cut, and paste it onto your empty canvas. It should be kind of transparent. Play around with layers and such to get a nice look. Hope I helped...
Edit: I forgot to say that you can do that with multiple images and place them on the same canvas and they'll look blended together. That's what I meant by play with the layers, you can put certain ones so that they'll show a bit more than the others by putting that image as the last layer or on top.
Use the move tool (the arrow with the 4 mini arrows attached to it next to the selection tool) to move particular images around to your liking. Select different layers to edit particular images on the canvas. I hope this isn't too confusing...

FallenAngel411
03-24-2005, 05:48 AM
I think I get it....I actually found the program you're talkin about on here...I never knew it was there. Only a 16 day trial, though. But anyways...thanks for the advice! I'll just go play around with it now...I'll try some of what you said. I have no clue what I'm doing. :p

rubah
03-24-2005, 05:51 AM
Psh, you don't need either of those.

Get the Gimp:D It's free, and just as good as photoshop. (And I'm serious about this. I used it for my art contest picture at school and had trouble touching up in PS at home. Plus, it saves .psd files a lot smaller) Gimp.org

Generally, people use images they like or that are relevant and chop them up to put together for a sig. My sig has rinoa and squall art from Itadaki Street Special, some official game art, and teaser renderings that square released.

You could draw your own, if you wanted. Just play with them and experiment and try not to overuse the filters *too* much;)

After that, save it as a jpeg, gif, or png. It usually doesn't matter which, you can make images look good in any format if you know what you're doing (unless it has many colors and is a gif, but if you're using photoshop, they can make the dithering pattern look really pretty) But you probably should stick to jpegs until you get an intuitive feeling for what format will serve which purpose best^_^ (some people are purists, but I try to maximize speed for download and best representation of the image)

After you save it, (oh, and put your images on different layers and play with the layer settings too!:D), find an image host like photobucket.com and upload it there to plug into your sig or avatar^_^

Cybele
03-24-2005, 05:57 AM
I think I get it....I actually found the program you're talkin about on here...I never knew it was there. Only a 16 day trial, though. But anyways...thanks for the advice! I'll just go play around with it now...I'll try some of what you said. I have no clue what I'm doing. :p

I only had a trial run of paint shop pro on my computer. Lucky you, sounds like you have photoshop. Gradients (click and hold the paint bucket and another thing should come up, pick gradient) are your best friend. Play around with the opacity and transparency. If you need anymore help on photoshop, I'll be happy to assist.

Jojee
03-24-2005, 06:10 AM
For my graphical av/sig sets, I use Paint Shop Pro 7. ^_^ You can download a trial version. It takes a while to figure out, as does any program.

For this this, I just used HTML and drew up a crappy but cute text avatar. *wins* :</>D

Mindflare
03-24-2005, 09:26 AM
Use The GIMP. It's entirely free and has all the same functionality as Photoshop. I wouldn't take a crap on Paint Shop, personally. I just don't like it.

My best suggestion is to get used to whatever software you decide to use before you jump right into making sigs. It's very fun, I think.

crono_logical
03-24-2005, 10:22 AM
The GIMP is great, and completely free, like already mentioned before me in here :p I've made all my recent animated gifs using it. I believe Photoshop couldn't handle animated images very well last time I checked :p

VoodooChild
03-24-2005, 10:31 AM
The best way to learn, no matter what package your using, is just to play around with it and get used to it....You can look up a few tutorials, but I found that teaching yourself is better...You may find the package confusing at first, especially photoshop, but you soon get used to it!

rubah
03-24-2005, 08:16 PM
PSP isn't too bad. It's what I do most of my stuff in.

But I wouldn't use it for anything big and serious. 300x300 if it's for fun, but smaller if it needs to look good:)