Banner Tutorial
The userinfo says that tutorials for other types of graphics are allowed...
g_shadowslayer asked how I made this banner, which is now being displayed as the community banner over at 
stargate_still. Unfortunately I did not save the PSP file (in fact, I didn't realize that there was a way to save the layers so that when you opened the file you got them all together at that point -- learn something new about that program every week) so I can't give exactly what I did.
However, I think I can fake it.
See, what I remember about this banner was how ridiculously simple it was to make. Unlike most of my large, large endeavors it involved less than twenty layers, just to start. So, here's my attempt at recreating what I made.
First things first, you're going to need a few things for this sort of banner and for this banner in particular.
01. This screencap.. It's from SG-1's Singularity, capped by myself, and is larger in dimension than my banner is going to be. That helps a *lot*.
02. Also, this cap. It's a HQ cap from
tehshroom, off of her journal, from Siege III. If you download her caps please comment and credit!
03. At least this large texture by_dysfunction. I may have used another texture but if so I don't yet remember it and may need to add it in later.
To be honest, when I started I didn't know what I was going to use. I just knew that I had to use both SG-1 and SGA, it had to be a certain size, and I didn't want to use any promotional images or cliche shots. I'd just recently downloaded the Siege III hi-res caps and capped Singularity myself so as my most recent caps in those respective fandoms it's unsurprising I rifled through those.
But the first real step I did was this:
Create a new image. I did a white background and aesthetically figured that if it had to be 595px across 250px down was a good fit. I may have tried 300px down first, but I settled on 250.
Then, once I decided on what I wanted, I took my first cap, in this case the Singularity one (henceforth refered to as Sin 01) and pasted it as a new layer to my new image. Sin 01 will not move an inch from here the entire time.
Once it was pasted I used the Automatic Contrast Enhancement (Adjust-->Brightness and Contrast-->Automatic Contrast Enhancement in PSP, though PS should have a similar feature) and set it to "Darker, Normal, Bold" to increase the shadow. The idea is to make the image look more three dimensional without making the little figures black outlines. Contrast it but not TOO much.
Then I took the Siege III cap (henceforth Siege 01) and pasted it as a new layer. The grass/horizon line in Sin 01 provides the perfect breaking point for a banner like this and so what I did was move Siege 01 down until the top of the grass in Sin 01 was just *barely* peeking over the cap line. The idea here is to find a natural stopping space -- a line that already exists within your image, whether that be a horizon or a shadow or a wall crease. Anything that the eye is already naturally going to stop there when splitting up the image into analytical parts.
[The trick to these things is all aesthetics and understanding how the human eye and brain breaks down images when it processes them. Read a chapter in a bio book on the optical nerve and a chapter in an art book on the colour wheel -- I can almost guarantee that it'll make graphics easier.]
Okay. So, I have the basic step up of my banner. Currently it looks a little something like this:
[Click on the image for full size.]
It's clearly so many levels of not done, but the next step is actually pretty easy. What you need to do is erase sections of Siege 01 so that the steps in Sin 01 are visible.
Use the eraser tool in your program and select the layer that Siege 01 corresponds with [in my case Raster 3], then erase the parts you need to. I have mine set to Size: 32, Hardness: 45, Opacity: 100. In PSP8, at least, if you erase a part you didn't mean to you can make it reappear by holding down the right mouse button instead and going over that spot again. It may help here until you get the hang of it.
When you try this you're going to realize that the composition is a little off -- not enough of Sheppard and McKay show -- and so you're going to need to delete that layer, copy the original cap again, paste it as new layer, and readjust so that the picture is where you think the heads need to be.
Yes, I did just write a backstep into a tutorial. That's what people never do but trust me when I say that every single piece of graphics work I've ever done, ever, has had at least one backstep. If yours are too then you're doing something right.
Now, this time I tested it really quickly each time I moved it by erasing the area around Rodney's head and lining that up where I liked it with the steps. When I found a good place I kept it there and started erasing in line with the horizon. Everything in Siege 01 above the horizon of Sin 01 had to go so that only blue sky was left. Then I erased in line with the steps on both sides so that I created a sort of triangle shape, which left way too much green on the right side (your right side, facing the computer screen), so I un-erased that to the edge of the green.
I find that magnifying the image when I'm trying to erase [in PSP8, click on the image and then use the scroll button to make larger and smaller in sight at will] really helps, as well as adjusting the size of the brush to smaller for tight corners.
I ended up with this, where I'm a little off from my original banner but not by much:
[Click on the image for full size.]
Now that part that is really so easy it's actually embarrassing starts. I took what I have above and copied the entire thing (copy all layers, copy merged, etc, depends on your program) then pasted as a new image. It's all one layer now (you can also Merge All) but I prefer to keep the original multi-layers intact just in case).
Then I took the above texture by_dysfunction and pasted it above the image (i.e. top layer) before moving it up. I knew I wanted the spikes to show up but only half of them so I moved it up until only the body and tips of the bottom half of the spikes were showing. Then I set it to "Multiply" and readjusted so that the red tint lined with up the horizon. That's it, that's all I did.
What I ended up with is this, which might look familar:
[Click on the image for full size.]
Since this was so easy I think I'll add a few steps here. In this case, text. In thestargate_still banner I used a quote from an exchange between Jack O'Neill and John Sheppard so I thought I'd do that again.
The font I'm using is Death Struggle, at size 9, with 0.0 stroke width, 287 kerning and -99 leading. If you don't have PSP8 you'll probably have to play around. To note about Death Struggle, capitals are outlined as a block, lower case are just lettering. This is important.
Using intermittent capital letters I wrote out "And I think people who don't want to go" to the left side of the Stargate in black/black lettering. Then, I applied and then clicked on a section of the banner underneath that line and wrote out "are Equally as Whacked" -- [Capitals used to denote where I used capitals] -- also in black lettering.
Obviously part of the quote is missing here and so what I did was switch to white letting and click inside the Stargate itself, then write out:
THROUGH [hit enter]
THE [hit enter]
STARGATE
and centered it inside the Stargate itself.
The only problem is that with white lettering the contrast is a little low so I created a new layer in between the texture layer (Raster 2 for me) and the text layer (Vector 1 for me) and selected a round tool paintbrush of about 5 size and 50 hardness in a dark green. Then, once again magnifying the image, I painted under the white lettering, being as careful as possible to ONLY paint under the letters. That was *too much* contrast however so I reduced the opacity of that layer to 32% (using the sliding scale to the side menu) and ended up with my final product:
[Click on the image for full size.]
And that's how I made this banner! It's actually probably the easiest banner I've ever done. Any further questions are totally cool and any comments are appreciated. I'm not sure how clear all this is, after all.
- Andrea.
g_shadowslayer asked how I made this banner, which is now being displayed as the community banner over at 
stargate_still. Unfortunately I did not save the PSP file (in fact, I didn't realize that there was a way to save the layers so that when you opened the file you got them all together at that point -- learn something new about that program every week) so I can't give exactly what I did. However, I think I can fake it.
See, what I remember about this banner was how ridiculously simple it was to make. Unlike most of my large, large endeavors it involved less than twenty layers, just to start. So, here's my attempt at recreating what I made.
First things first, you're going to need a few things for this sort of banner and for this banner in particular.
01. This screencap.. It's from SG-1's Singularity, capped by myself, and is larger in dimension than my banner is going to be. That helps a *lot*.
02. Also, this cap. It's a HQ cap from
tehshroom, off of her journal, from Siege III. If you download her caps please comment and credit!03. At least this large texture by
_dysfunction. I may have used another texture but if so I don't yet remember it and may need to add it in later. To be honest, when I started I didn't know what I was going to use. I just knew that I had to use both SG-1 and SGA, it had to be a certain size, and I didn't want to use any promotional images or cliche shots. I'd just recently downloaded the Siege III hi-res caps and capped Singularity myself so as my most recent caps in those respective fandoms it's unsurprising I rifled through those.
But the first real step I did was this:
Create a new image. I did a white background and aesthetically figured that if it had to be 595px across 250px down was a good fit. I may have tried 300px down first, but I settled on 250.
Then, once I decided on what I wanted, I took my first cap, in this case the Singularity one (henceforth refered to as Sin 01) and pasted it as a new layer to my new image. Sin 01 will not move an inch from here the entire time.
Once it was pasted I used the Automatic Contrast Enhancement (Adjust-->Brightness and Contrast-->Automatic Contrast Enhancement in PSP, though PS should have a similar feature) and set it to "Darker, Normal, Bold" to increase the shadow. The idea is to make the image look more three dimensional without making the little figures black outlines. Contrast it but not TOO much.
Then I took the Siege III cap (henceforth Siege 01) and pasted it as a new layer. The grass/horizon line in Sin 01 provides the perfect breaking point for a banner like this and so what I did was move Siege 01 down until the top of the grass in Sin 01 was just *barely* peeking over the cap line. The idea here is to find a natural stopping space -- a line that already exists within your image, whether that be a horizon or a shadow or a wall crease. Anything that the eye is already naturally going to stop there when splitting up the image into analytical parts.
[The trick to these things is all aesthetics and understanding how the human eye and brain breaks down images when it processes them. Read a chapter in a bio book on the optical nerve and a chapter in an art book on the colour wheel -- I can almost guarantee that it'll make graphics easier.]
Okay. So, I have the basic step up of my banner. Currently it looks a little something like this:
[Click on the image for full size.]
It's clearly so many levels of not done, but the next step is actually pretty easy. What you need to do is erase sections of Siege 01 so that the steps in Sin 01 are visible.
Use the eraser tool in your program and select the layer that Siege 01 corresponds with [in my case Raster 3], then erase the parts you need to. I have mine set to Size: 32, Hardness: 45, Opacity: 100. In PSP8, at least, if you erase a part you didn't mean to you can make it reappear by holding down the right mouse button instead and going over that spot again. It may help here until you get the hang of it.
When you try this you're going to realize that the composition is a little off -- not enough of Sheppard and McKay show -- and so you're going to need to delete that layer, copy the original cap again, paste it as new layer, and readjust so that the picture is where you think the heads need to be.
Yes, I did just write a backstep into a tutorial. That's what people never do but trust me when I say that every single piece of graphics work I've ever done, ever, has had at least one backstep. If yours are too then you're doing something right.
Now, this time I tested it really quickly each time I moved it by erasing the area around Rodney's head and lining that up where I liked it with the steps. When I found a good place I kept it there and started erasing in line with the horizon. Everything in Siege 01 above the horizon of Sin 01 had to go so that only blue sky was left. Then I erased in line with the steps on both sides so that I created a sort of triangle shape, which left way too much green on the right side (your right side, facing the computer screen), so I un-erased that to the edge of the green.
I find that magnifying the image when I'm trying to erase [in PSP8, click on the image and then use the scroll button to make larger and smaller in sight at will] really helps, as well as adjusting the size of the brush to smaller for tight corners.
I ended up with this, where I'm a little off from my original banner but not by much:
[Click on the image for full size.]
Now that part that is really so easy it's actually embarrassing starts. I took what I have above and copied the entire thing (copy all layers, copy merged, etc, depends on your program) then pasted as a new image. It's all one layer now (you can also Merge All) but I prefer to keep the original multi-layers intact just in case).
Then I took the above texture by
_dysfunction and pasted it above the image (i.e. top layer) before moving it up. I knew I wanted the spikes to show up but only half of them so I moved it up until only the body and tips of the bottom half of the spikes were showing. Then I set it to "Multiply" and readjusted so that the red tint lined with up the horizon. That's it, that's all I did. What I ended up with is this, which might look familar:
[Click on the image for full size.]
Since this was so easy I think I'll add a few steps here. In this case, text. In the
stargate_still banner I used a quote from an exchange between Jack O'Neill and John Sheppard so I thought I'd do that again. The font I'm using is Death Struggle, at size 9, with 0.0 stroke width, 287 kerning and -99 leading. If you don't have PSP8 you'll probably have to play around. To note about Death Struggle, capitals are outlined as a block, lower case are just lettering. This is important.
Using intermittent capital letters I wrote out "And I think people who don't want to go" to the left side of the Stargate in black/black lettering. Then, I applied and then clicked on a section of the banner underneath that line and wrote out "are Equally as Whacked" -- [Capitals used to denote where I used capitals] -- also in black lettering.
Obviously part of the quote is missing here and so what I did was switch to white letting and click inside the Stargate itself, then write out:
THROUGH [hit enter]
THE [hit enter]
STARGATE
and centered it inside the Stargate itself.
The only problem is that with white lettering the contrast is a little low so I created a new layer in between the texture layer (Raster 2 for me) and the text layer (Vector 1 for me) and selected a round tool paintbrush of about 5 size and 50 hardness in a dark green. Then, once again magnifying the image, I painted under the white lettering, being as careful as possible to ONLY paint under the letters. That was *too much* contrast however so I reduced the opacity of that layer to 32% (using the sliding scale to the side menu) and ended up with my final product:
[Click on the image for full size.]
And that's how I made this banner! It's actually probably the easiest banner I've ever done. Any further questions are totally cool and any comments are appreciated. I'm not sure how clear all this is, after all.
- Andrea.