Ok I need help from you guys... (PColaV6!)

I was reading through that contest thread about the forum sig... I dont know a thing about making a sig... I know nothing about photo shop.

I downloaded a photo editor from downloads.com and started playing with it and I cant get anything done! The main thing I cant figure out is how to "combine" the photos or kinda drop one into another. All this stuff is big time confusing for me. Can anyone offer any tips?

 

Honestly, there are very few ways to 'learn' how to photoshop. You can either fumble around with it for a while and slowly learn it or go to school for it.

If you are just starting out, I'd say look for an older version of paint shop pro like 7 or 8. PSP is much easier to learn than Adobe. You can look for tips online, but for the most part they are designed more for folks who already have a little more knowledge in hand.

Good luck and keep working with it!

 

I learned photoshop from just messing around in it for a few hours, I still don't know half of what can be done but for not having paid any money or spent any time in a course about image editing I think I'm off to a good start. If you have a torrent client you can 'acquire' photoshop CS2, or you can download a trial of photoshop, which is what I would recommend. I have a cd key gen somewhere around here that'll unlock the trial to the full version (I didn't say that).

The basic concept of Photoshop and other image editing programs like Fireworks (which sucks! lol) is layering, which is described in the word itself, the bottom layer is your background, the 2nd layer is on top of that, 3rd, 4th, etc etc you can have as many as you want. That's how you combine images..basically. Like my signature, those 3 pictures on the right are each their own layer, my name is a layer, and the background image is another layer. Once you figure out the basics of layering you can move into stuff such as distorting layers, filters (I don't really recommend the use of filters, they're kinda...'hey look at this filter i applied!' boring), lighting editing, brushwork, etc etc. It's all kind of hard to explain, a good thing to do would be to search for some video tutorials for the basics of Photoshop or whatever image editing program you're using. Once you have the basics down, it's all fun from there, experiment and play around in it, it's pretty fun and a good thing to know about in today's world.


This is the basic break down for how I made my sig.

First I started off with a palette, 480x180 is a good signature size, I made it a little bigger than what would actually show because I knew I wanted it to be a transparent .PNG file to give it a natural appearance up against the forum background, to make it look as if it's floating. Then I pasted in the main image I wanted,which automatically became Layer 1 and sized it and cropped it to where I wanted it (shift+click lets you resize the selected layer while keeping the proportions). Then I used the rectangular marquee tool to make a box within the image, a few pixels from the edges of the picture, and right clicked and chose to select inverse, then I copied that and pasted it, creating another layer. That would be the boarder for the main picture, I did some brush work and lighting changes to it to make it look how it does. Then I used the text tool for my name, which was layer 3, distorted it slightly and changed the options to give it a glow and shadow. Then I opened up another image, selected all, copied and pasted it into the project (layer 4), resized it how I wanted, rotated it how I wanted, and moved it to the side. Then repeated that with the other 2 photos, and gave them all outlines and shadows.

That was basically all, there are more efficient ways to what I did but I just wanted to get it done to update my old sig. lol

 

Awsome thanx for the tips guys. I have seen that layer option in this program i downloaded (Corel Paint Shop Pro) I have been messing with it for about 3 hours now... still dont know how to do nothing but I will eventually get it. When I want to do something and dont know how it bugs the **** outta me till I figure it out! LOL

 

Haha, just don't give up, start off with something small like taking 1 single picture, giving it a filtering effect and a border, from there you can go onto more complex things.

here's a link for a 30 day trial for the new photoshop, you could give this a try
http://adobe-photoshop.en.softonic.com/

 

Theres nothing like getting the whole Adobe CS3 Masters Collection for free.