Custom Made Sig and Avatar [12]

Wenda, very nice works lately. You are really coming up with fresh ideas.

When you render a character to a sig, make it sure that it should touch the lower boundery of the design area, or the lower margin of the design space. Dont place it in the middle of a sig. For that purpose you may need to use the select inverse and delete technique. If you want, Boohboh (or me) can guide you through the process.

And, you need to place a shadow to the character, as it is standing in front of the sig. It will give a sense of depth there. An example if what I mean .....



Other than those two creative criticisms, I am admiring your learning curve. Keep it up :)

Wenda said:

Thanks, Gary.

Sorted transparency. My mistake for doing these so late at night, forgot a step.

Not a critical prob, they were basically just exercises to keep me occupied during the slower parts of the cricket...

The second is purely an experiment, not one to be used. I do quite like the (Neon Ice, unmodified) effect, but it needs more work yet.

BTW, how to re-size from 1300x300 to 650x150 without loss of quality/resolution??

These look quite horrid (OK, more horrid) when re-sized.

Wenda.

Nice ones Wenda, I think I like the second one more.

Britton30 said:

With you image selected, click Image in the menu bar, and follow the arrows as in this snip to resize. You can save it as the new size. Go back to PS and undo one step to save one at 1300x300.
This is PS CS6 ,but I think will be the same.

Attachment 277120

As addition to this, be sure to first save the 1300x300 sig both as a .psd and .png, and the resize the .png file and not the .psd file. That way your effects won't resize with the image, as happens when you resize a .psd file

Wenda said:

A re-work of the sig I did for A Guy.

These ones are nicer, methinks.

The colours suit the 'Li'l Devil' theme much better.

Wenda.

boohbah said:

As requested!
thought i would make a dark evil sig ...

preview

Attachment 277115

sig

Attachment 277116

Nice one Boohbah!
Is the noise on the sides of the letters a filter, or because of the rendering?
If it's because of the rendering, you might want to have a peep at the Ray Tracer menu in Edit > Preferences > 3D. by default it's set to 10, which is very high and will take a lot of time to render, so if you change it to something like 6, it'll be done way faster, and the quality loss is only slight:)
Also, in stead of rendering the entire image, you could also do the following trick;
While in the 3D workspace, hit M to equip the rectangular marquee tool. Then select the part of the sig/image you want rendered, and then hit alt+shift+ctrl+R to render the selected part.

Wenda said:

By request... for a fellow EF member.

I don't think it looks too bad. Finding some decent bike clip-art was the fun
part... I have lots of bike-related stuff, but not dirt-bike-related. I cut these
from a couple of photos I found online, then re-sized and rotated them.


Wenda.

Just saw it in EF, very nice sig Wenda!

Wenda said:

Going thru my psd files, and finishing off some that were worthy, deleting a lot of rubbish and failures. Got the rest organized into folders instead of them being all over the place.

Much better, and much easier to navigate and find stuff. Now for the artwork and all the bits and bobs I've downloaded.

This is going to make things much easier, and I've been putting it off for too long.

This one's a composite of several failures and incomplete sigs, I saved some of the 'better' parts and threw this together, and deleted the rest. I'll keep it as a template for whenever I need a 'quick sig' in a hurry.

The folder's only about ¾ the size of what it was before I started.

God, how I hate HDD-housekeeping...


Wenda.

When you design a lot of things it's always easy to lose track of where you save what, organizing will help a lot there:) I checked my GXF HD yesterday, 2500 files excluding textures and stock images 0.0

Arc said:

Wenda, very nice works lately. You are really coming up with fresh ideas.

When you render a character to a sig, make it sure that it should touch the lower boundery of the design area, or the lower margin of the design space. Dont place it in the middle of a sig. For that purpose you may need to use the select inverse and delete technique. If you want, Boohboh (or me) can guide you through the process.

And, you need to place a shadow to the character, as it is standing in front of the sig. It will give a sense of depth there. An example if what I mean .....



Other than those two creative criticisms, I am admiring your learning curve. Keep it up :)

Great advice and great template Arc!


Nommy

Nommy wrote:

As addition to this, be sure to first save the 1300x300 sig both as a .psd and .png, and the resize the .png file and not the .psd file. That way your effects won't resize with the image, as happens when you resize a .psd file

That's exactly the problem I was having, and the solution I needed! It wasn't an issue before, as I was working in 650x150, but when I changed to working in 1300x300 it was the ones I'd resized the psd and not the png that I was having the problem with.

Still, we live and learn, although I'd probably have worked it out eventually.

All good now. :)

Thanks!! And thanks everyone for the advice and encouragement, as always.

I'll try some more tips and tricks later...


Wenda.

Wenda said:

A re-work of the sig I did for A Guy.

These ones are nicer, methinks.

The colours suit the 'Li'l Devil' theme much better.

Wenda.

Wenda said:

By request... for a fellow EF member.

I don't think it looks too bad. Finding some decent bike clip-art was the fun
part... I have lots of bike-related stuff, but not dirt-bike-related. I cut these
from a couple of photos I found online, then re-sized and rotated them.


Wenda.

Wenda said:

Gong thru my psd files, and finishing off some that were worthy, deleting a lot of rubbish and failures. Got the rest organised into folders instead of them being all over the place.

Much better, and much easier to navigate and find stuff. Now for the artwork and all the bits and bobs I've downloaded.

This is going to make things much easier, and I've been putting it off for too long.

This one's a composite of several failures and incomplete sigs, I saved some of the 'better' parts and threw this together, and deleted the rest. I'll keep it as a template for whenever I need a 'quick sig' in a hurry.

The folder's only about ¾ the size of what it was before I started.

God, how I hate HDD-housekeeping...


Wenda.

Very nice Wenda, I can see a big difference just in the last two or three signatures you have made quite an improvement.

boohbah said:

As requested!
thought i would make a dark evil sig ...

preview

Attachment 277115

sig

Attachment 277116

That is awesome Julian

Wenda said:

That's exactly the problem I was having, and the solution I needed! It wasn't an issue before, as I was working in 650x150, but when I changed to working in 1300x300 it was the ones I'd resized the psd and not the png that I was having the problem with.

Still, we live and learn, although I'd probably have worked it out eventually.

All good now. :)

Thanks!! And thanks everyone for the advice and encouragement, as always.

I'll try some more tips and tricks later...


Wenda.

You're welcome

I had the same issue a while ago. Resizing only affects effects such as Bevel and Emboss and Drop Shadow, so as long as you don't use those, you probably won't really notice it:)

Whenever you bump into something, don't be afraid to ask it here, there are a lot of very experienced designers who'd all love to help:)


Nommy

Nice one Boohbah!
Is the noise on the sides of the letters a filter, or because of the rendering?
If it's because of the rendering, you might want to have a peep at the Ray Tracer menu in Edit > Preferences > 3D. by default it's set to 10, which is very high and will take a lot of time to render, so if you change it to something like 6, it'll be done way faster, and the quality loss is only slight:)
Also, in stead of rendering the entire image, you could also do the following trick;
While in the 3D workspace, hit M to equip the rectangular marquee tool. Then select the part of the sig/image you want rendered, and then hit alt+shift+ctrl+R to render the selected part.

thanks for the tips nommy,
i used an action to give me the depth on the letters, its not a 3d render.
after i used the action i transformed the perception, this threw the depth layers out slightly giving the flare, thats why i used a speckled effect on the depth and lightened the top,
i dont mind the little flaring as it stops it looking too clean and straight.
as its a animation type inspired sig there is a little room for that
than in a sharp crisp lines in a glassy looking metal type sig
i will look at the setting though for when i do get round to using the 3d stuff.
thanks.

Bongo said:

boohbah said:

As requested!
thought i would make a dark evil sig ...

preview

Attachment 277115

sig

Attachment 277116

That is awesome Julian

thanks jerry

kandypenny44 said:

I can't figure out why it's Not animating unless you Click on the Picture ?

kandy, if you upload the image to a hosting site or use the dropbox public folder then you can copy the image link and paste it in the forum using the little icon with a mountain and sun in the post editor ,
that way they will show the animations.

boohbah said:

kandypenny44 said:

I can't figure out why it's Not animating unless you Click on the Picture ?

kandy, if you upload the image to a hosting site or use the dropbox public folder then you can copy the image link and paste it in the forum using the little icon with a mountain and sun in the post editor ,
that way they will show the animations.

Thanks I'm Doing that Now !

Well, that opened a can of worms...

You'll remember that I said yesterday (post #847?) that I was cleaning my psd files up, and getting rid of some rubbish? Well that plan, like Topsy, grew. One thing led to another five, and so the whole system has copped a 'bosphoric'. Some of the stuff hadn't been sorted or culled for several years. Several folders with names like 'Back this up' or Don't forget to save these'. Of course, they had been, but the originals remained, taking up space. To quote Tommy Chong. 'Not any more, Man!'.

Many files/folders had also been saved more than once, over several drives. These have also now been consolidated and tidied up. There were system images from six different setups (Win 8.1 on this, Win 8.0 on this, Win 7 64-bit on this, Win 7 Ult 32-bit on the other laptop, and Vista Ult 32-bit, XP Home/Pro 32-bit & Windows ME on the desktop box Well, you know what I'm like with my OSes...) and they were all over the shop. They've been sorted and allocated a partition on an external Seagate all their own.

Saved files over five different OSes, on three separate machines, have been consolidated and one backup saved, rather than nine, in the case of one particular folder. My OSes (all 20+ of them) have been either copied from the CD/DVD or ISO'ed, and saved in one place. This includes all my Windows/DOS stuff, half-a-dozen Linux distros, and quite a few other freeware &/or obsolete OSes. There's even a Solaris install there somewhere, GEOS, ReactOS, BEOS, and more. That's not to mention the non-PC stuff. There's GEOS and DolphinDOS for the C64, plus another whose (very forgettable) name escapes me. There are three or four OSes for the Amiga, and a few other CP/M or Unix derivatives as well.

Having them sprayed over so many systems, or on dying floppies, wasn't on. I don't regard the copying of them for my use only as making me one of those who fly the 'Jolly Roger' either, as I've got either the product keys, the OEM disks, or, in the case of stuff released BD (before DRM) I've kept the original, sometimes unusable, disks. I defy anyone to get my original MS-DOS 3.1 floppy (5.25") to even boot, but its ISO does in V-Box, every time.

I got rid of over ½TB of garbage on this machine and the externals alone, easily.

My problem is that, like many of us 'old-timers' I learned to be eternally vigilant back in the Old Days. My shoe-box-sized 80MB HDD in the 386 required constant house-keeping to free up every available kilobyte. Then we got big drives. And we got slack. This Sandy-Bridge i7 laptop has 2x750GB spinners in it as supplied, and there's nearly 4TB attached as follows: 1x640GB Acer-branded pocket-drive; 1x640GB Samsung-branded pocket-drive: 1x Seagate 500GB external drive: 1x Seagate 2TB external.
The other lappy (250GB internal) and the desktop(4 or 5 drives with different OSes) runs mainly off a 320GB (Vista) an 80GB (XP Pro) a 20GB (XP Home) and a 5GB (ME).

So, getting that dog's breakfast sorted took all day, but I'm very happy with the results. Now I can get back to doing more sigs and wallpapers, but with the added advantage of being able to find stuff...

I'll post a couple of before/after shots of my drive setup on the big laptop, with all the externals plugged in, when I've finished. You'll see for yourself how much carp I got rid of... and I'm still going.

Curse you SevenForums...!!!


Wenda.

I'd like to see the shoebox-sized 80MB HDD.