Working on Auroz's request for a character tutorial now... This will be my first tutorial so don't scream and yell at me too much when it doesn't look as smoothe as others do... <puppy dog face>
[p]I'll only scream and yell if you dont't post enough screenshots [/p][p]Naw, even then... thanks for doing it! I'm so excited.. I'm bored at work and keep checking back... Could you make her hair longer/flowy like how I've tried in my sig? But less crappy haha.. and show the tools and steps pweese![/p][p]Thanks![/p]
So, I wrote up this nice long tutorial, went to edit something and about 95% of it vanished with no way for me to get it back... So, give me some time to re-write it. Ugh. Plus, I suck at the whole hair thing. Might need someone that knows what they're doing to intervene. But I'll still post what I made.
Kaethen Aramae's Makeshift Tutorial on Character's for Signatures! All work in this tutorial is done in Photoshop CS2. My end result. 1. Place the image of your character how you want them positioned in your signature. 2. Clear the character of any excess you don't want shown. For instance, the background in this screenshot. I use the Polygonal Lasso Tool with a 1px feather to cut-out any of the characters I'm working on. Others have different ways. Whichever is easiest on you is best. My tool has a 1px feather on it so the edges aren't so harsh on my cut-out. 3. I usually cut my character out on a background rather than transparent so I can see where the edges meet the background and go from there. I'm not going to get into how I make backgrounds in this tutorial because it's not about that. So instant-background it is! 4. Adjust the character's levels. The level table can be found at Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. These were the presets I used on Auroz. Darkened it a little bit, but lightened up spots as well to get a decent contrast showing. 5. Use the Blur Tool and smoothe the skin. Try to avoid areas like the mouth, nose, and eyes at this time. The bridge of the nose is fine to smoothe, but I suggest no further. For the sake of the tutorial, let's say role-play wise, Auroz has green eyes. The dark elf spectrum of eyes ranges from blues-pinks and the green option is not available. On your signature, you can display green eyes though. 6. Using the Brush Tool, select the soft round brush and size it to 10px, or however large the area may be that you'd like a different color. This includes parts of skin, lips, hair, etc. But for now, we're going to say eyes. Create a new layer and color that part in. 7. On the layer properties drop-down menu, switch from normal to color. This will work with just about every color. 8. On a duplicate layer of the character, crop out the hair. (I am not the best hair manipulator, I'll admit, so skip the hair part if you know better!! ) If you go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation of your hair layer, you can change the color to whatever you please. It's not neccessary or even used in this tutorial, but if your colored hair needs to be more vibrant, or roleplay wise, they have a different color of hair not available to them, this is one way to achieve that. Now, let's put troll Auroz away... 9. Make yet another duplicate layer of your original character cut-out, but hide it. Hide also the newer hair only layer. This helps clean up the image if you smudged a lot of the face, but liked the direction it was going with the hair. With 20% strength, I just grabbed sections and fanned it out. It's not what Auroz was thinking of as far as hair goes I'm sure, but it's all I could do and I don't think it looks too terrible. She's kind of cute. Smudge the rest of the hair down to up or up to down -- trace the way the hair is moving to get rid of harsh pixels. You may also blur. Make any clean-ups you need to do by making the original layer visible and erasing the parts you don't like of the copied layer that you just smudged. Making your hair-only layer visible, set the options from normal to darken. This will give her a richer, darker hair color. 10. Use your Dodge Tool at 20% Highlights and go over the lighter spots of her hair that have already been hit by light. Popular spots for this are the chin, part of the neck, tip of the ear, bridge of the nose and cheekbones under the eyes. 11. Looking back over it, I highlighted the shiny part of her bottom lip. Glossy glossy! Now, the Burn Tool is a very finicky tool - it can easily be friend or foe and some characters don't even need this. Contrary to how we did the dodge, you do not want to start shading in the darker areas any more than they are. Leave them alone. Instead, at 20% on midtones, go over the top lip, bottom lip shadow, chin/neck shadow, and around the eyes. I burned in the crease of her ear too... because I can. ;p At this point, I'll usually throw in a Guassian or Motion Blur from the Filter section. 2.0px Guassian Blur 40px Motion Blur at a 0 degree angle. Then with more brush fun, a border and some text, I'm usually done. :/
Cinnamon In Cinnamon's request, I was asked to stay away from reds (hehe). I, personally, have no problem with that since I think a lot of people order red sigs anyway. I chose to use gold instead to show her High Elven heritage, and black swirls to show the dainty necromancer side of her. I love the screenshot she sent me to the left. Her eyes are actually golden! But I didn't want two main faces for her so I gave it a gold hue. Here's the image after I touched it up a bit: Gorgeous eyes!
THANK YOU! Wow she is soo much prettier, and I learned lots of things. I think I may print this out when I get home haha. -I'm ok with backgrounds I think, its just the character editing that gets me! -I had no idea about adjustment levels. I assume its like the brightness/contrast feature but better? I will need to look at it more since the screenshot of the adjustment level window baffles me. No idea what any of that means. -And OMG I had *no* idea I could do the color thing with layers. I use layers but.. not like that... I would tediously redraw stuff or fill in color pixel by pixel to not mess up the image. wow. this is so much better.. i'm such a noob - I really didn't think smudging and blurring could look so good. I usually like crisp character images, but it looks great in the sig you made. And it makes the hair much less stiff..l I love it.. really need to play with the smudge tool. again, thank you for taking the time to do this, i learned lots of stuff haha, i may use your sig if i dont get around to playing around with a new one for myself. i know people can make better sigs than me, but i prefer to make my own even if it sucks hehe. thank you, o wonderful teacher haha! ps.. you were right about the eye color, i want her eyes to be green and tried to make them the most green as possible for a dark elf. and i love the violet/pinkish color of the background!
Auroz - I'm glad the tutorial helped! I thought for a while you'd roll your eyes and be like "Dammit, I knew that. Wow, he really does suck at hair!" If you use it though, be sure to post the result. I'd really like to see it. Cinnamon - I really like how your siggy came out! And I'm also happy you like it. I'm looking forward to your other characters!
Hi! Here is my result after using the tools you showed me how to use!! Thank you, couldnt have done it without you! http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...16�
Oh please! I doubt you got that from /my/ tutorial! It looks too good. Great job, Auroz! Maybe soon we'll see sigs being made by you too!
[p]Kaethia Kaethia is Kaethen's in-game twin sister, so you know it had to be good. ;p Wish I could say more about it - I kind of just got to take the screenshots and have full artistic liberties... (I know, dangerous. For all she knew she could have ended up with pink mouse ears and a tail.) ((...which she should have.)) (((...wish I would have thought of that before...))) <ahem> The swirls on the face is, of course, not allowed in the arasai character customization - I just thought it looked nice, dammit. [/p]
I'm going to make a new thread for my sigs under this name since I won't be using the other account anymore and won't have access to update/edit it.
Darkdayz Darkdayz sent me an email requesting a signature that's eerie and forboding with black and red in color. It didn't take much work considering he fit the bill, himself. Everyone should recognize the icon/avatar as being the warlock option from SOE. I just colored the flame differently to match the rest of the signature. Enjoy, Darkdayz! PS - Sig sans guild, which I want to try to remember including in every request incase of change:
