Simple(est) sig tutorial

[[Ghost]]

People ask me everyday, how do you make things so simple and clean? How can I make my sigs nice and unique like yours?! I always liked to be unique in everything I did, including this. Sure my sigs never really get rated in the show off thread, big whoop. So here I am to give you an inside view on how I make most my sigs.

Step one is to listen to some music. Some good music where the lyrics tell a story, or a song you really relate to. Some music that you can listen to as actual poetry rather than just gutiar solos left and right. So I chose Dashboard Confessional (A girl made me sing it to her once, I remember her everytime I hear the lyrics)



You have to use winamp other wise your uncool.

Step 2 is to open up the intarweb. Firefox, IE, Opera, what ever you use to look at porn. Then search for the lyrics of the song. I use Letssingit.com



Now that you have the exact lyrics that you want, open photoshop and make a new document, I use 350x150 but as you will learn later, use what YOU want.



Now you need to pick eaither a color or two matching colors. Thats right, no useing Color Balance for color. Your color should be earthy (meaning darkish)



Now that you have your color, fill the canvas with it. Open up the color selector agian and go up with the cirlce to choose a lighter color than the background is. You can do this really easly by holding shift and going up with your mouse at the same time. Tip: Holding shift always gives straight lines, no matter what your doing.



Bring the web page back up and find a line of lyrics that you really like/relate to.



Now you're going to want to make the text look better, so set your background color to white, so you have your lighter color as the foreground color and white as your background color. Your colors should look like this



Now copy and paste the lyrics.

[/url][url=http://img128.imageshack.us/my.php?image=simple59fi.jpg]

Now open up the Layer Options for the text layer (You can do that by right clicking the layer and hitting "Layer Options")
Put a gradient overlay on it. You're going to want to put more red than white into your text for the best looking text. Also put a stroke of 1 black pixel.



Now for the hardest part of the Tutorial.

[SIZE=6]BE CREATIVE.

I know its hard, but come on. I get sick and tired of seeing the same shit inside of the show off thread. It's all just some brushes and a "render". You made neither your self. You had the puzzle peices and all you did was put them together, good job you can pass second grade. Add custom shapes, make somthing with the pen tool, try using only filters, only use default brushes. Do SOMTHING Original for once.

Another thing is that, to learn off of tutorials you need to experiment a little. I always see cookie cutter sigs around here. Same shit, diffrent color, diffrenet "render". Try making your own brushes, your own methods of doing things.

This was my little tutorial/rant. Hope it helped you somehow.
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[Immortality]

Excellent Ghost I agree with you even if I have never used the photoshop

[fleaflickerx]

very good for a simple tut GG ghost