Get Gimp Here: http://www.gimp.org/ Want to be a gimp wizard? No problem, I'll teach you how... This tut is pretty basic... if you're new to gimp you're gonna find that no matter what you do in gimp, at first it seems infinitely harder than it is in photoshop One of the most basic things you do in making a sig is apply a highlight to an image, some call it a border or an outline, or a glow this tutorial will be done using this render: ok after you have gimp installed (windows users follow the instructions on gimp.windows.com) 1. launch gimp and open the render: file>open>renderlocation>render.png 2. copy and cut the render: ctrl-a, then ctrl-x 3. create a new image: file>new 4. create a new layer to paste your render into: to get the layers dialog box go to dialogs>layers to create the layer, select "new layer" in the layers dialog box... name this layer "render" or "alien" or something like that, I prefer to go with an object name b/c it will help you keep things organized especially when you have a lot of layers. Select layer fill type as transparent, then click ok once you have created your new layer highlight it in the layers dialog box, and press ctrl-v to paste your render into that layer, click outside of the selection to anchor the render to the new layer in this step I also selected the background layer and used the fill tool (shift+b) to change the color to black at the end of this step you should have something like this: note: at this point you should have 2 layers in your image 5. Adding the glow effect: to add the glow effect start by creating a duplicate layer of your alien layer, select the layer in the layers dialog box, and hit the duplicate layer button now select your duplicate layer and go to Script-Fu>Alpha to Logo>Alien glow set the glow color to white (in this example the color is white, it may be whatever you please) and hit "ok" you'll notice that this script creates a lot of new layers many of which are not needed for our purposes delete the layers "Background#1" and "alien copy", select the alien glow layer and move it under your render layer, and you're done save the image as you wish... you may want to save an xcf file first (the gimp equivalent to psd) for a slicker look try lowering the glow size to your preference final version: Please note that I specifically selected a render for this effect, a render is basically an extracted image - - meaning that it is just the object w/o a background, usually saved as a png. this effect will not work w/ images that are not renders b/c the effect is applied to the border of the image I hope you like my gimp tutorial, stay tuned for more p.s. as you can see my sig was created in gimp using this effect btw +rep to the first person who tells me the real name of the alien in this render
lol... so no one's interested in gimp?... it's FREE, and you can use all of the photoshop plugins edit: that'll be a different tut
In a way, yes, because I already know how to do these glowing affects. What I want to know is because some people might not want to use that alien pic, maybe another one that isn't PNG, how do they get the, lets say it was a pic of a girl, how are they to get only the girls face out of the pic and leave behind only the background. Sorry if this doesn't make sense. But + rep anyways for the tutorial
no problem, it's called extraction... that'll be my next tut the alien pic is just what I used for my render, you can use any render you like
you can get tons of renders here: http://planetrenders.net/ you have to create an account first though
Ok...I have Windows so :? ...The download paqe looks like a readme file. I'm not sure which file to download
Alright If you have windows go here: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html you need to install The GIMP for Windows (version 2.2.13, fixed installer) and GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment (version 2.10.6, for Windows 2000 and newer) once you have those installed you should be all set