composer of requiems
12-07-2006, 11:36 AM
Just felt like writing a tutorial on signatures in general. This is a rough guideline to making signatures. I'm covering from very basic to more advanced than average.
Oh, and I'm putting it in chapters for the fun of it.
The result is here, http://forums.narutofan.com/showthread.php?p=6246736#post6246736
Tutorial to make a basic sig.
CHAPTER 1: IN WHICH THE STOCK IS SEVERED FROM THE BACKGROUND
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/2196/001vl6.jpg
The first step is selecting a stock. I picked this one, because I've been wanting to use it for some time, so I might as well just throw it into this tutorial. If you're wondering, it's Nero from DMC4.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6875/002dp0.jpg
So anyway, after that, usually, if you're opening it from a jpg or something like that, photoshop automatically sets it as "background". You'll have to doubleclick the layer to make it editable. Just click OK. Most of the settings should be acceptable.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6228/003mj4.jpg
Now, the next thing you'll want to do is to cut out the stock.
This is not necessary, but strongly recommended:
1) Make a new layer below it, and colour it a contrasting colour. I got this idea from the bluescreen/greenscreen that movie makers use. Basically, if it's a contrasting colour, then you can be sure that the anti-aliasing is done properly, and you're not missing out on anything that you are cutting.
2) When you cut, make use of a "layer mask". That's the thing that I've circled in red. If you've selected a layer or folder, and you press that button, you'll see the little white rectangle next to the layer. A layer mask decides what part of the layer is visable. White means visable and black means invisible. Grey means somewhere in-between. As you can see, there's a small black spot on the rectangle, which corresponds to the transparent area at the top left of the actual image. You can see the green beneath through it. This is why I picked green. It's very easy to see, so you know if you've cut something.
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/5734/013jc1.jpg
As you can see, once you have a green background, you can tell right away if there's a little bit of something that you forgot to cut.
Very important. When you're using a layer mask, make sure you click on the small white rectangle next to the image layer. Otherwise, you might accidently edit the original image, and not the mask. If you're editing the mask, you should see an outline around it.
This is one way that you can cut out the stock. You can take an eraser, and slowly, manually do it little by little. However, this is time consuming, so there's other ways to do it.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/4898/004oh5.jpg
One way you can cut it very rapidly, but not always accurately, is using the "magic wand" tool. It's the one near the top-right of the toolbar. Basically, when you click on something, it'll find all the pixels with the same colour.
You'll probably want to change the settings near the top.
Tolerance indicates how picky the magic wand is. A low tolerance means it'll only select pixels with very similar colours, while high tolerance means that if you click on something red, it'll also select bluish-red, greenish-red, yellowish-red and so on.
Anti-alias indicates how smooth it is. No anti-alias means it'll go pixel by pixel, while anti-alias makes some things partially transparent, so it looks smoother. It's a bit tricky to explain, so I'll save it for another tutorial XD
Contiguous is asking if you want only pixels next to each other, or if let's say there's a small speck of the same colour far away from where you originally clicked, and not connected to it at all, should it still be selected?
Finally, "use all layers" indicates whether to use only the layer you're selecting, or select EVERYTHING. Generally, I don't want this to happen.
The other thing you'll want to take note of is the foreground/background thing that my little red arrow is pointing to. Let's put it this way. Normally, brushes functions with the upper ("foreground") colour, and eraser just erases. However, on a layer mask, brush will still use the "foreground" colour, but eraser becomes a brush that uses the "background" colour. Meaning that if your foreground is white and your background is black, makes the image visable and eraser makes the image invisible. But if foreground/background is inversed, then your brush will make things invisible and your eraser makes them visable again.
If you didn't get all that, just remember to make sure that the upper box is white and the lower box is black when you edit layer mask.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/5769/005gj8.jpg
So as I was saying, after you select all that with the magic wand... pressing delete while selecting something has the same effect as erasing. And you'll notice that a large chunk of the image is gone, but if you look at the layers panel, you'll see that the original image is still intact, and the layer mask now has a big chunk of black corresponding to the parts that disappeared. This is the advantage of layer mask. If you screw up, you can undo it.
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/2014/006av4.jpg
However, this is not accurate, and the anti-aliasing never works out properly, at least not the way I want it to. There's a method in-between pixel-by-pixel editing and magic wand editing, which involves vectors. For this, I recommend first using the freeform pen tool. Rightclick the symbol on the toolbar that the arrow is pointing at, and select it.
After that, go to the top, and select magnetic. This will help a lot. Just click on the image, and go around the picture. The "magnetic" function makes it "stick" to pixels of similar colour, kinda like the magic wand, so you can go faster and still be roughly accurate. However, this does take a bit of practice. You don't need to be 100% accurate yet, just get the rough outline first.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6306/007au7.jpg
Now that you've got the outline, turn the fill down to 0. It's important to make a distinction between "fill" and "opacity", and I'll do so later. Just turn it down to 0 for now, so that you can see BOTH the outline and what you want to cut.
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/1900/008xs4.jpg
I suggest you zoom in here. As you can see, no matter how good your mouse is, the freeform pen tool is still not 100% accurate. So, it's time to fix it.
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4954/009yd2.jpg
Go back to the button just now, right click it and look at the bottom 3 options.
Vector shapes are defined by "anchor points". It tells photoshop to "draw lines between these points, and hence make a shape". There's two things that you need to know about each point.
Firstly, where is the point? This is the position.
Secondly, which direction do I draw lines from? If you see two small lines sticking out from the point, these are to tell photoshop which direction to connect it in.
Now we see the 3 tools.
Add Anchor Point adds anchor points. If you click on a blank spot on the line, an anchor point appears. You can use this tool to drag it around. You can also drag existing points. If you click on the little line sticking out of the anchor point, you can extend it.
Delete Anchor Point deletes anchor points. If you click on an anchor point, it disappears. You can also move points, but be very careful. I don't recommend using this. Instead, if you hold down "alt" while using Add Anchor Point, it will delete instead. It's a very useful shortcut.
Finally, Convert Point converts points. If you click on a point... remember the little line thingies sticking out of it? They just vanish! If you click and hold down, then drag, they appear again! Please note that you can't drag around points with this tool, which is really sad.
My best advice while you're using this is just practice. It's hard to explain how to make it work, but if you play around with it, it can get instinctual. I've seen people pick this up in an hour and start doing proper vectoring.
Oh, and I'm putting it in chapters for the fun of it.
The result is here, http://forums.narutofan.com/showthread.php?p=6246736#post6246736
Tutorial to make a basic sig.
CHAPTER 1: IN WHICH THE STOCK IS SEVERED FROM THE BACKGROUND
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/2196/001vl6.jpg
The first step is selecting a stock. I picked this one, because I've been wanting to use it for some time, so I might as well just throw it into this tutorial. If you're wondering, it's Nero from DMC4.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6875/002dp0.jpg
So anyway, after that, usually, if you're opening it from a jpg or something like that, photoshop automatically sets it as "background". You'll have to doubleclick the layer to make it editable. Just click OK. Most of the settings should be acceptable.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6228/003mj4.jpg
Now, the next thing you'll want to do is to cut out the stock.
This is not necessary, but strongly recommended:
1) Make a new layer below it, and colour it a contrasting colour. I got this idea from the bluescreen/greenscreen that movie makers use. Basically, if it's a contrasting colour, then you can be sure that the anti-aliasing is done properly, and you're not missing out on anything that you are cutting.
2) When you cut, make use of a "layer mask". That's the thing that I've circled in red. If you've selected a layer or folder, and you press that button, you'll see the little white rectangle next to the layer. A layer mask decides what part of the layer is visable. White means visable and black means invisible. Grey means somewhere in-between. As you can see, there's a small black spot on the rectangle, which corresponds to the transparent area at the top left of the actual image. You can see the green beneath through it. This is why I picked green. It's very easy to see, so you know if you've cut something.
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/5734/013jc1.jpg
As you can see, once you have a green background, you can tell right away if there's a little bit of something that you forgot to cut.
Very important. When you're using a layer mask, make sure you click on the small white rectangle next to the image layer. Otherwise, you might accidently edit the original image, and not the mask. If you're editing the mask, you should see an outline around it.
This is one way that you can cut out the stock. You can take an eraser, and slowly, manually do it little by little. However, this is time consuming, so there's other ways to do it.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/4898/004oh5.jpg
One way you can cut it very rapidly, but not always accurately, is using the "magic wand" tool. It's the one near the top-right of the toolbar. Basically, when you click on something, it'll find all the pixels with the same colour.
You'll probably want to change the settings near the top.
Tolerance indicates how picky the magic wand is. A low tolerance means it'll only select pixels with very similar colours, while high tolerance means that if you click on something red, it'll also select bluish-red, greenish-red, yellowish-red and so on.
Anti-alias indicates how smooth it is. No anti-alias means it'll go pixel by pixel, while anti-alias makes some things partially transparent, so it looks smoother. It's a bit tricky to explain, so I'll save it for another tutorial XD
Contiguous is asking if you want only pixels next to each other, or if let's say there's a small speck of the same colour far away from where you originally clicked, and not connected to it at all, should it still be selected?
Finally, "use all layers" indicates whether to use only the layer you're selecting, or select EVERYTHING. Generally, I don't want this to happen.
The other thing you'll want to take note of is the foreground/background thing that my little red arrow is pointing to. Let's put it this way. Normally, brushes functions with the upper ("foreground") colour, and eraser just erases. However, on a layer mask, brush will still use the "foreground" colour, but eraser becomes a brush that uses the "background" colour. Meaning that if your foreground is white and your background is black, makes the image visable and eraser makes the image invisible. But if foreground/background is inversed, then your brush will make things invisible and your eraser makes them visable again.
If you didn't get all that, just remember to make sure that the upper box is white and the lower box is black when you edit layer mask.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/5769/005gj8.jpg
So as I was saying, after you select all that with the magic wand... pressing delete while selecting something has the same effect as erasing. And you'll notice that a large chunk of the image is gone, but if you look at the layers panel, you'll see that the original image is still intact, and the layer mask now has a big chunk of black corresponding to the parts that disappeared. This is the advantage of layer mask. If you screw up, you can undo it.
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/2014/006av4.jpg
However, this is not accurate, and the anti-aliasing never works out properly, at least not the way I want it to. There's a method in-between pixel-by-pixel editing and magic wand editing, which involves vectors. For this, I recommend first using the freeform pen tool. Rightclick the symbol on the toolbar that the arrow is pointing at, and select it.
After that, go to the top, and select magnetic. This will help a lot. Just click on the image, and go around the picture. The "magnetic" function makes it "stick" to pixels of similar colour, kinda like the magic wand, so you can go faster and still be roughly accurate. However, this does take a bit of practice. You don't need to be 100% accurate yet, just get the rough outline first.
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6306/007au7.jpg
Now that you've got the outline, turn the fill down to 0. It's important to make a distinction between "fill" and "opacity", and I'll do so later. Just turn it down to 0 for now, so that you can see BOTH the outline and what you want to cut.
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/1900/008xs4.jpg
I suggest you zoom in here. As you can see, no matter how good your mouse is, the freeform pen tool is still not 100% accurate. So, it's time to fix it.
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4954/009yd2.jpg
Go back to the button just now, right click it and look at the bottom 3 options.
Vector shapes are defined by "anchor points". It tells photoshop to "draw lines between these points, and hence make a shape". There's two things that you need to know about each point.
Firstly, where is the point? This is the position.
Secondly, which direction do I draw lines from? If you see two small lines sticking out from the point, these are to tell photoshop which direction to connect it in.
Now we see the 3 tools.
Add Anchor Point adds anchor points. If you click on a blank spot on the line, an anchor point appears. You can use this tool to drag it around. You can also drag existing points. If you click on the little line sticking out of the anchor point, you can extend it.
Delete Anchor Point deletes anchor points. If you click on an anchor point, it disappears. You can also move points, but be very careful. I don't recommend using this. Instead, if you hold down "alt" while using Add Anchor Point, it will delete instead. It's a very useful shortcut.
Finally, Convert Point converts points. If you click on a point... remember the little line thingies sticking out of it? They just vanish! If you click and hold down, then drag, they appear again! Please note that you can't drag around points with this tool, which is really sad.
My best advice while you're using this is just practice. It's hard to explain how to make it work, but if you play around with it, it can get instinctual. I've seen people pick this up in an hour and start doing proper vectoring.