I've made a couple of adjustments to the arcade; most importantly, I've changed it so that everyone can now create tournaments; not just mods plus.
As a way of funding GUA's hosting costs, i've decided to offer users something extra in return for a small price. I am making avaliable 100 (93 remaining.) @giveupalready.com email addresses. Which can be setup as a stand alone email account or set to forward all email to another account.
You may choose any username for the account provided a) It isn't the username of someone else's gua account (ie not your own) b) It constitues a valid email address (certain chars such as @ are not allowed in email usernames for obvious reasons) and c) It isn't a name associated with a special meaning (eg admin, webmaster etc)
Emails will be assigned on a first come first served basis at a cost of £12 for the whole year. Anyone who has made a donation to GUA since January 2009 gets one for free (i'll need the paypal email address used for verification), moderators+ get a £2 discount, as do the first 5 signups.
To get your email account setup Pm me (Carnage) with your desired username and password and i'll give you instructions regarding payment. This thread can also be used for questions/queries.
I made this tutorial a while ago when I had my own graphics site. Its not a really detailed tut, but should help show people new to Photoshop some basic techniques that can be used to make banners and other art.
Ignore the URL and name at the top as the site no longer exists.
Feel free to post results and comments/criticism, but remember that it is meant to be very basic!
[Shadowed] I once got really, really fucked up on acid and whiskey.
[Shadowed] And someone handed me a cartoon blunt.
[Shadowed] And I seriously tried to smoke it.
[lenin] and you sucked--oh
[Shadowed] It even had "blunt" written on the side.
[Shadowed] In crayon, no less.
[PAFFRATH] Can I have sex with said cyborgs?
[Shadowed] Might chafe.
Very nice tut Disasterpiece, specially for people just starting to use photoshop for making banner and sigs.
Tiger45: You can use the edit button in order to prevent double posting. Your signature looks oke, although the render is a bit choppy on the edges, you could try smoothing that out a little more.
The way you 'install' new fonts in windows is relatively simple. After you have downloaded the new font, its probable in .zip or .rar format, you need to unpack those first. Open the file and extract the font from the file (it has a .TTF extention which stands for True Type Font). You can either do this by dragging the file from the folder into a new one (or onto you desktop), or selecting the 'unpack' option and then selecting the folder you want to copy it to.
After that you want to get the file into the appropriate folder so you can use it. If you use windows, then this folder is located at C:WINDOWS/Fonts. Simply cut/paste your file into that folder. It might ask you if you want to 'install the font', if it does, simply click ok.
(A quicker way might be to directly unpack you font file to the windows fonts map, but you won't notice it if the file is corrupt when you do this).
For your first couple of banners, you've done well.
There are a few ways you can make the render seem smoother and blend into the background better. One is to select everything but the render with the magic wand tool (on the render layer of course) and right click > feather > and make it 3/4/5 pixels, whatever looks good. You may need to do this more than once.
There are plenty of other ways to blend the render in, and to put a banner together in general. Follow a few of the other tutorials on here and try out different techniques, you can only improve!
Another thing I would suggest though, is making a border. I think I explained how to do one in the tut, the easiest way is to just do a 1 pixel black one. (Forget the overlay border layer in the tut if you don't like how it looks). Like you did with your first banner.
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Lightning
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Fire
Linear Mode
