Custom Made Sig and Avatar [12]

[Arc]

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

 

[nommy the first]

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.

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.

View 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

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.

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

preview

View attachment 277115

sig

View 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.

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!

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

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 .....

View attachment 277174

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

Great advice and great template Arc!


Nommy

 

[Wenda]

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.

 

[Bongo]

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.

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.

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.

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

preview

View attachment 277115

sig

View attachment 277116

That is awesome Julian

 

[nommy the first]

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

 

[boohbah]

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.

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

preview

View attachment 277115

sig

View attachment 277116

That is awesome Julian

thanks jerry

 

[boohbah]

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.

 

[kandypenny44]

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 !

 

[Wenda]

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.

 

[Britton30]

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

 

[Wenda]

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

Well, not quite, perhaps.

But it was a 5.25", took up two bays height-wise, and was about 9" long. The 10MB drive in my XT/AT was smaller!!? It and its tape drive took up less space!! Put MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and MS Office or Works on there, and that was it. Goodnight, Irene. Maybe room for Doom or Duke Nukem 2, but that was it. I compressed it, which helped.

One thing it was, was it was 100% dead reliable. It literally never let me down.

Can't even remember the brand, I suspect it may have been an early 'Quantum' drive along the lines of the later 'Big-Foot' drives... The PC was an Osborne full-tower 386SX20 with 4x1mb 30-pin RAM and 512kb of graphics. :shock:

I even had to buy the sound-card (SB2.0 8-bit) separately (A$85 at Hardly Normal). Not a PCI slot in sight in those days, though VESA (VLB) was around. Anyone remember VLB? Anyone???? Oh, OK. And a single-speed CD-ROM was around $2000 then, with an SB2.0 and two crappy speakers that wouldn't do justice to an mp3 player.!!!!

I had my first experience of PC gaming on this machine (it came with Wolfenstein 3D installed) and I very nearly wrote the PC off as a gaming box. Bear in mind I'd just upgraded from the C64 via a souped-up A500 Amiga (both of which I still own), and was in two minds whether PC or Apple was the way to go. But fitting a sound-card and buying a D-pad controller for arcade games made the decision between PC and Mac a non-starter. Had to wait till my first 486 (DX4/100-16mb-VESA 2mb) in 1997 to get a CD-ROM drive, tho.

Twenty years later, I'm still here...

Wow!!


Wenda.

 

[Anak]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to see if I could do a little better than the sig that I first created, the one I carried before I asked for your help in creating a new one for me. Stephanie, boohbah, and Kandy really got my creative juices flowing and I really appreciate that and the effort they made for me.
My effort is presently showing below.

I looked into the free offer of CS2 and found too many ambiguous opinions on whether or not CS2 was actually free so I decided to try Gimp. There does seem to be a stiff learning curve, but the only way to get your feet wet is to dive right in.

I have loads of location shots and decided to use them as they would be reminders of my travels.
This one is a view of the Rockville Bridge from River Road about 7miles North of me, built in 1902 it remains the longest stone masonry arch railroad viaduct in the world.

There are a few questions about creating this sig that I have.
How does anyone obtain the service badges that 7F awards members, do you cut them out and save them yourselves?
What about the different Icons like this: Same method?
Are there saved files that can be freely obtained?

One of my main concerns is copyright infringement, do we have an understanding with the Admins that as long as we use them for Forums use its okay?

I'd still be willing to try CS2 if anyone could point out any hassles in getting it, and getting it installed. First off it looks like I'd have to create an Adobe Account to get started, and that's where I stopped.

 

[Arc]

Right click on a badge, save image as png and save it

The icon you said ...

Save it. All those are our resources, you can use all those freely within the forums

 

[kado897]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to see if I could do a little better than the sig that I first created, the one I carried before I asked for your help in creating a new one for me. Stephanie, boohbah, and Kandy really got my creative juices flowing and I really appreciate that and the effort they made for me.
My effort is presently showing below.

I looked into the free offer of CS2 and found too many ambiguous opinions on whether or not CS2 was actually free so I decided to try Gimp. There does seem to be a stiff learning curve, but the only way to get your feet wet is to dive right in.

I have loads of location shots and decided to use them as they would be reminders of my travels.
This one is a view of the Rockville Bridge from River Road about 7miles North of me, built in 1902 it remains the longest stone masonry arch railroad viaduct in the world.

There are a few questions about creating this sig that I have.
How does anyone obtain the service badges that 7F awards members, do you cut them out and save them yourselves?
What about the different Icons like this: View attachment 277332 Same method?
Are there saved files that can be freely obtained?

One of my main concerns is copyright infringement, do we have an understanding with the Admins that as long as we use them for Forums use its okay?

I'd still be willing to try CS2 if anyone could point out any hassles in getting it, and getting it installed. First off it looks like I'd have to create an Adobe Account to get started, and that's where I stopped.

I installed the "free" CS2 version without too many problems and it works just fine. The only real problem I had was because I was installing it on an x64 machine. It objected to the Program Files (x86) path name so I just installed it in the root of C:.

My take is that if Adobe were worried about the free download they would have shut the page down long ago.

 

[lorddenis]

Great sigs evryone! :

 

[Britton30]

Steve (Anak) here are some badges from my self and Nick I believe.
These are mine and have the Skilled badge that's not used anymore.

View attachment My Badges.zip


View attachment SF glossy badges.zip

 

[Anak]

Arc,
I've done that before, the only reason I can think why I didn't this time is, I was preoccupied with working with Gimp.

Kado,
I'll be working on getting CS2 installed. It's late now so I'll wait until later.

lorddenis,
Thank you from my end.

Gary,
Downloaded and saved.

Thank you to everyone!

 

[Britton30]

You're welcome Steve. I forgot to add that I had downloaded and installed the PS CS2 as an experiment, and it is indeed free, I think I did have to register or give an email addy or something.

 

[Anak]

I think I did have to register or give an email addy or something.

That's my take on it also.

 

[Wenda]

The 'free' CS2 suite is nice, and is what I began on, but I'm really liking Photoshop CS5e.

I find that I can do more, and more easily, in CS5 than in CS2.


Nice work, Anak...

Wenda.