TT2: Banner Tips and Tricks 1

[tehodis]

Tehodis Tutorial 2: Banner Tips and Tricks 1

 

I've received requests from alot of people about banner tips, and so I've decided to make a few. I've only finished one for now, but I hope you'll find it enlightening.

 

Banner Tips and Tricks 1: Using layer properties and basic tools to create something eye-catching

 

Obviously the first thing you want to do when you make a banner is find an image. I don't like using renders, so I'm not going to use them. You can if you choose, but I'm not including background making in the tutorial.

 

 

Once you've chosen your image you're ready to start. The first thing to do is resizing + cropping, some people do like to resize after, I'm not one of those people. If you havn't tried it, I urge you to do so. Leave your image as-is and skip to the next step. If you want to crop/resize now, keep reading.

Now again, personal preference plays a role in here, but I like to crop first. So take your cropping tool and crop to a good size for a banner (Horizontal rectangle). Once you have the right shape, use your 'resizing' tool and input pixels (if you know the size you want it) or percentage (if you don't). I like to use percents, because I can test them out before hand using the magnify tool. Once you have that done (depending on the bluriness of your image, you might want to sharpen it once before you move on!), you can move onto the next step!

 

 

 

OK, now that we've got all that basic stuff done, it's time to figure out some good tools! My personal favorites are Screen, Burn and Soft Light. For this banner, I chose to use combinations to make an effective banner.

 

I first started off making a SOFT LIGHT layer, which I blurred a bit. This gave a very soft look, I do this for alot of my banners. Although Soft Light can be used for many things, other than softening the image. Another common use for Soft Light is to define the image under a texture. By pasting a texture on top and then having the original image set on SOFT LIGHT brings out the image atop the texture. Soft Light is a tool that's fun and easy to use, and I think that every graphics person should get well acquainted with the tool as it's quite handy.

 

 

Now I like to use two things together, that normally wouldn't do the image much good on their own. Those two things are BURN and SCREEN. Now, BURN can often make an image too dark, with all the dark colors turned black and the lighter colors looking darker. The high amounts of black, make the image look boring. If you use burn with other effects, it can be amazing. SCREEN can make an image look too light, and I don't like using it on it's own. But together the two look great.

For this image I used a color on my burn layer, and not the image itself. It's another thing I do commonly, and I know many other graphics artist's do as well. The most common color for a burn layer is light blue. I used (#A3F2F5) for this image. Then on top of that, I used the image (from the base layer. DUPLICATE LAYER, drag to where you want it) set on screen. No effects added to it.

 

 

Here's my layers right now:

 

Now the fun part, adding a texture! This is one of my favorite parts, cos I get to use my favorite thing to make. Textures. They are all over the internet, on DeviantArt, there are sites made just for textures. I have around 680+ textures on my computer. And I'm going to put one to use now, and I'm going to teach you how I use textures effectively.

Now find the texture you want and paste it as a new layer on your image and position it how you want. Select a layer type to put it on, I chose HARD LIGHT.

 

 

Now you need to pull out the 'polygonal lasso' tool. It's the one that looks like a lasso, of course. Set it on POINT TO POINT, smoothing 1. Now you outline the SUBJECT of the image. For me of course, it's the girl. You don't even need to go very slow, since the outline can be messy. I don't normally go slow at all. Once you complete the outline, double click to have it selected. Once you have it selected, go to Selections > Modify selections > Inside/Outside Feather. Set it to INSIDE on 1. Press OK. Now CUT the selection (ctrl+X, MAKE SURE YOU'RE ON THE TEXTURE LAYER) and make a new layer. Press CTRL+SHIFT+L and the part you cut will be inside the area. On the layer you pasted the cut-out bit on, DECREASE the LAYER OPACITY. I chose to move it to 46%, then I put it onto the same setting as the other TEXTURE layer, which for me was HARD LIGHT.

 

 

Now I went and took the visibility off of the texture layers, and pressed CTRL+SHIFT+C, then I went on top of the texture layers and made this copy into a new layer, which I set on SOFT LIGHT. I made the texture layers visible again, and there was my image!

 

 

Now, no image is complete without a border. And you want a border that fits in, you don't want a black border that takes the attention from the image. No, you want a nice smooth-fitting border. Which is something else SOFT LIGHT is good for... I merged all of the layers together and made a new one. I selected the entire image, and then went to Selections > Modify > Select Selection Borders. I set it to 2 with NO ANTI-ALIAS, INSIDE.

I like to have my subjects jumping out the image, so then I took the easer tool and erased where the border went over the character before setting it to SOFT LIGHT and calling it done. You of course can now add text if you want.

 

Congratulations! You've made a banner!

 

 

if you have any questions/comments feel free to post them, I'd also love to see what you make with this tut.

[Cyber Altair]

thanks tehodis, this rocks, i'm going to try it out.

[Jerry OldMaster]

This is vital.

[God GAK]

very good tutorial tehodis! i bet this is for PSP 8. think it can be done in photoshop?