[Tut] Making Banners for PL LR thread, part 1

disciple

9070 Posts

November 16 2009 15:35 GMT

Hi all!

I decided to make a series of short tutorials about making banners and other gfx for your PL LR threads. There are many ppl in TL, who are way better than me in Photoshop, but the point of these tutorials wont be to show you some incredibly hard stunts. The point is rather to show how to make some really basic tricks, which are really a part of the ABC of the image editing. Even if you are totally new to Photoshop you should be able to do what I described here and hopefully, I will help you improve your gfx attempts.

I use Photoshop 6.0, which is really old but what is shown here could be applied in the new version as well. I doubt there are vast differences in the interface. If you have any suggestions or questions pls share your feedback.

So lets begin !

1. Choosing the image you will work with

This part is really important. There are a couple of things you should consider. First is the quality and the size of the picture, the larger the better. Second is the frame - avoid pictures with only half of the players head or smth like that. Here is a simple example :

THIS IS WRONG!

Yeah the pose is cool, but part of bisu's head is missing, there is a watermark and his hand is blurred. Always think first how you are going to "cut" out the player. Blurred object dont work. So:

THIS IS RIGHT !

Studio pictures are always the best - the light source makes the image very friendly for editing. You can find HQ pictures in NeverGG's site or the website of the proteams.

2. Cutting the player out
The best way to cut any shape or object out of an image is the Polygonal Lasso Tool. The work with it is really easy, I dont need to get into that. The main thing is to be really patient, dont rush it, you dont want to make it twice.

Once you selected what you want, Select Inverse and delete the background...

If your work with the lasso wasnt good enough you can smooth the edges with the Eraser tool. Once again be careful and dont rush it :

It should be smth like this...

Dont forget about the other body parts, even if the edges are good, you still might left some pixels from the background :

And thats about it!

3. Editing Brightness, Contrast, Color Saturation and Hue
This is the most important part. What makes the good image good are not the filters and the effects ppl randomly throw around. Brightness, Contrast and Colors are the foundations of any image, manipulating them is key of achieving your goal. But the most important thing is really to keep the balance and not make it too over. Lets try the Brightness/ Contrast settings...

THIS IS WRONG!

My tip is never to change the brightness or the contrast with more than 20 points, either in positive or in negative direction.

To "wash out" the colors use the Color Saturation...

Like this:

Experiment with the scale to see the results for yourself

Another option is to make the image black and white from here:

Black and white images leave options for playing around with the brightness and the contrast. As I will show below.

If you want to make a stroke for the image I recommend double stroke for black and white. You do it like from here

For the inner stroke pick 3 pixels, it should be a bit wider. Click on "outside" to set where the stroke should be placed.

You can ofc pick whatever color you want, generally I never use 100% white, cant really explain why thou...

To make the outer black stroke repeat the same operation but set the stroke to be 1 pixel wide. And thats about it!

4. Putting color on black and white images
You can selectively put colors on some parts of your black and white image to create the "sincity" effect. Its really easy to pull it out. First, make a new layer above the one with the player image and set the blending option of the layer to "multiply":

After that pick a simple brush with 100% hardness, select a color and start painting whatever areas you want:

You can pick whatever brush size you want, if you step outside the area you wanted to color, just use the eraser tool to fix it. The end result should be smth like this:

The Multiply blending option of the layers creates a really intensive and a bit darker color. If you want to change it to more "realistic" and washed out color, which wont stand out as much, change the blending option to Soft Light, like this:

Once you colored the area its really easy to change the color, you dont have to use the brush again. Just go again to the Hue/Saturation settings and play around with the Hue scale:

This is useful if you want to make all blue or all green theme to your banner, no need to keep colors as they are in real life

Here are variations of the Bisu picture with different contrast brightness etc settings:

5. Composing the PL banner
Once you are done with editing the player image there isnt much work left to be done.
First make a new image: about 400 pixels high and 590 pixels wide. It should be exactly this wide to fill up the forum layout of TL. To make the banner blend with the forum layout, you should fill it with the same color. Here are the settings for the color

Another way is just to make a screen shot of the forum layout and use the color selection tool to automatically find the right color. You can use transparent background as well. Once you are done with this, just drag the picture of the player from the other image into the banner. Remember to lock the layers of the player or just merge them with each other. See the small icon just near the eye icon of the Bisu's layers? That means the layers are connected to each other and whenever you move one of them the other will move with it as well

In this case Bisu's picture is too big for our banner so we have to shrink it down. To do so go to the Free Transform settings:

To keep the proportions of the image hold shift while dragging the spots in the edges diagonally. Like this:

Once you are satisfied with the size of your guy, move him where you want him to be, like this

To make Bisu blend into to the forum layout you must remove the edge at the bottom. There are many ways to do it in this case but generally if you want to make the whole edge of the image to "disappear" its best to use gradient with the same color as the forum layout. You must set the gradient like this:

To apply the gradient, drag you mouse from the bottom of the image to the center like this:

If the edge is still there you can use a brush with no hardness to fix that:

smth like this:

Now, to put some logos and lettering. You can take the white PL logo I'm using from here

For the Shinhan Bank lettering you can use whatever font you want, I used Trajan

I thought what will be the best theme to present in this first tutorial so I decided to be the bubbles, cause they are really basic and easy to make. To make the babbles choose random size brushes with hardness 100% and put some spots on the banner, note that the layer of the dots should be below the lettering and the player image

Add another color, red goes well for our theme here...

Finally add some team logos and thats about it !!

mOnion

United States5657 Posts

November 16 2009 15:41 GMT

totally awesome guide!

the tips on color sat and brightness and such are notably helpful

Zona

40426 Posts

November 16 2009 16:04 GMT

Cool stuff - all the steps are now making me notice the subtleties the next time I see a LR thread banner.

fanatacist

10319 Posts

November 16 2009 16:18 GMT

This is awesome. I've always loved fucking around with Photoshop but I was never any good ): It's great seeing the details of how your awesome banners are made. Props!

Equaoh

Canada427 Posts

November 16 2009 16:20 GMT

This is awesome, I'm impressed and will now be off to play around in Photoshop.

Neivler

Norway911 Posts

November 16 2009 16:26 GMT

Is it just me or is your photoshop very outdated?

Vequeth

United Kingdom1116 Posts

November 16 2009 16:30 GMT

Amazing job, and yes neivler, but photoshop is photoshop

disciple

9070 Posts

November 16 2009 16:36 GMT

On November 17 2009 01:26 Neivler wrote:
Is it just me or is your photoshop very outdated?

yeah its old but it can do maybe 70% of what CS4 can. I dont really need the fancy stuff of CS4 to work I'm used to this old version. Nothing much has changed since PS5 till CS4. Sure the newer versions are better all rounders but the old ones are just as good in image editing