friendsterTalk - Friendster Forum

Here you have it, the last section of the Ultimate Beginners Guide to Photoshop. In this section you shall put to use everything you have spent days and nights learning (hopefully!) in the last three parts of this tutorial. What better way to do that than to make your very first stylish forum signature pic.


Start off by opening a document of your preferred size. For this tutorial we shall use a 500 x 120 px canvas. Before we get started how ever, we need some good stock pictures. We will need a nice background, grungy or tech preferred, and a picture of whatever you dig. I shall be using cars. Be sure to check out our Links page for a list of sites where you can find nice stock images.

Here are the stock images we will be using in this tutorial:



Open up the image that we will use as a background and copy/paste it into the signature’s canvas and move it around (using the move tool) until it looks good. Play around with the Brightness & Contrast as well:
[img]http://i6.tinypic.com/6u9tzdw.jpg[img]
Now open up the image of the car, copy the whole car using the marquee and paste it into signature’s canvas as well. You will notice that the car is way to big for the signature.So what do we do? Resize it down. With the layer of the car selected. Go to Edit > Free Transform. Hold the shift button down (to keep aspect ratio) and shrink down the car. To do so, mouse over near the corner of the image, click and hold while moving your mouse inward to make the car smaller. You may have to keep dragging the image back into view (to view the corner in order to resize it fully). When you are done resizing simply click on any one of the toolbar tools and it will ask you if you would like to apply the transformation. You should have something as shown below:

Change the layer effect of the car layer to “Linear Light” and you should get the following effect:

Notice that we need to erase the backdrop of the car image. Thus select a large soft eraser brush and slowly go over the car erasing its backdrop. We get the following:


Looking pretty neat already eh? Let’s add some text. Choose a nice font and set it to a color that compliments that blends in with the background. For this tutorial we used the following color: fbe9c8 (enter this code in the foreground color box in the field where it says “#”). Duplicate the text layer, rasterize it, go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and use the following settings:

Place the blurred layer behind the regular text layer. Add a drop shadow layer style to the regular text layer and the effect is shown below:

Change the layer effect of the regular text layer to “Overlay” and this is what you get:

Now it’s time to play around with what we have. If we wish to move the text around we will have to select both the regular text layer and the blurred layer and keep them intact throughout the move. How do you do this you ask? In the layer window, first select one of the two layers, and then while holding down the CTRL key select the other layer. You will notice both layers will now be highlighted. If you choose the move tool and move, you will notice they both get moved.

After adding another piece of text and playing around some more with the Brightness and Contrast, here is our final result:

And that’s a wrap folks. You are ready for the real world. Remember the best way to learn graphics is by experience. No one expects your first artwork to be magnificent but as time progresses you will pickup on elements of design that will help you become a pro. We hope this tutorial series helped you with those first few hurdles but as a famous proverb goes: You can take a donkey to the pond but you can not make it drink. It is all in your hands! Best of luck! Feel free to leave comments and browse our other tutorials.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here. I will try my best to help you out.