My Pics

[The Mask of Norro]

How dare you mock the good name of PSP Norro?

Rarely used in the workforce of graphic design, at least from what I've seen thus far. So, in short: what good name?

[IDOL]

Well I could do about anything with PSP 8 that the older versions of photoshop can. I downloaded a trial for the new CS and realized that it's like completely different, and after using PSP for 5 years it's really brain scratching to try and get used to photoshop.

Thus I <3 PSP, so don't you be hatin'!

[The Mask of Norro]

I be hatin' when I want, foo.

Oh, and you think CS is difficult? Try the learning curve you'll have going from your PSP into Illustrator. Thank God I had experience in CS, Illustrator's difficult to grasp at first

[IDOL]

Oh god, and top that off with the fact that I'm not familiar with macs, and my first graphic design course is next fall I guess I'm pretty screwed up the arse then, huh?

[K]

Macs are a piece of piss. Honestly, as long as you're not an idiot you'll have no problems. You'll probably even prefer it in some respects.

[Dan]

Those graphics are awful.

I use the term "Graphic" loosely as all you've done is take 3 PSD's from a site (too lazy to cut your own), added 1 or 2 effects and typed in a awfully generic font on top of it.

Try using some tutorials first - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=photoshop...:en-US:official

[Guest #AJ styles#]

ok yes on some of the pics all i did was get pics from a site and add a gradient map my last one was not made by pics from sites i cut the pics for it and like i told u before i suck at fonts gimme a break cause my photoshop for some reason doesnt exept my fonts that i download

[AJ]

You're using CS2? Wow, here I was thinking you were using PSP or something, looking at the text alone.

... Hey! I would've said paint, personally.

How dare you mock the good name of PSP Norro?

Rarely used in the workforce of graphic design, at least from what I've seen thus far. So, in short: what good name?

I use it and alldawson uses it (at least I think he still does).

As for the graphics, just keep experimenting and practicing. I could suggest reading a few tutorials, but I never did so that would be daft.

[K]

Honestly mate, the problem isn't 'Fonts', it's what you do with them. You don't need a huge array of fonts. I have a few gimmick fonts Scary/Techy/Gothy/Handwriting/Dirty/Block SansSerif and that's it. Granted I don't actually make graphics for the sake of it anymore, but it's far more important to have an arsenal of text EFFECTS in your armoury than it is to have a boat load of fonts.

Ditch the Sega font. It's bad form to use a font that is as associated with a brand as that is.

The first font in your Edge graphic is called Papyrus, correct? That's a pretty decent font if you use it right, I used it in a layout based on Serenity recently. (Papyrus was the basis for the Firefly logo (Fact, don't tell me it's different Firefly nerds I read an article by the chief designer on Firefly)

Anyway yeah, it's versatile. Try this. Type something in that font in photoshop, right click on the layer in your layers pallette and bring up Blending Options. Now follow this tutorial.

http://www.tutorials-photoshop.com/text-ef...ner-shading.php

See how much that adds, just by clicking a few options?

I'll warn you though, you will seriously overuse the blending options when you first discover them, just as you're over using the gradient map at the moment. But don't be disheartened, we all get stuck in our ways. My text has been the same for about a decade. Impact, Soft Bevel, Stroke, Solid Dropshadow. It's a bad habit, but I'm getting out of it, and had a lot of fun warping the text to get my spiderkeith avatar.

Just mess around, spend time reading very basic tutorials. Don't bother with complicated ones. Complicated tutorials tend to tell you how to do something very, very specific. I once read a ten page tutorial on how to make a very realistic sun. You know how many times I used it? Zero. It's just never come up, but I once found a great tutorial which was about five steps on utilising the spherise option, and I've made planets, suns, asteroids, all kinds of space debris from it, because it left me room to change it, and make something unique. In fact, you can see a sun I made from the tutorial in one of our murals. Norris and I bookended it with a planet each, and the good thing was, we probably made them in completely different ways, because we have two different styles.

Anyway, I've waffled a bit. The best advice I can give is, don't worry if you're shit. We all start off shit. Don't try and impress anyone, just keep a cool head, and try and learn from your own mistakes.

[K]

Eh, I'll keep typing. I've got nothing better to do.

Since you're new, and a wrestling fan, you're going to want to make wrestling graphics for a while. That's fine. Almost everyone here started the same way, myself included. It's a good way to get started actually. AllDawson probably has the honour of being our best wrestling graphics guy here. That's not an insult to him or anyone else, just calling it the way I see it. We all have our strengths.

Anyway, there are three basic components to a wrestling graphic. You have your Background, your Text and your Cuts.

The quickest way to make a good looking background is the blending of stock photos. A stock photo is a royalty free photograph of just about anything. The two best websites for these are

http://www.morguefile.org

http://www.sxc.hu

Find some photographs with some nice textures, interesting patterns and the like, and save them into a folder. Now open photoshop, and create a new document 800x600 and 96dpi. Open up about five or six photos and paste them onto new layers on this canvas. You're now going to want to play with the layer styles. I’ll do it as well so you’re not scared.

See here how I have five different photos on five different layers. Do something like this as well. Ok, now see where it says Normal? That’s your layer style. Normal means just that. It’s a regular normal layer. Click it and you can change it. Change the top layer to something other than normal and see how it reacts. Change all the layers except the bottom one and see what happens. Try as much as you want until you get something interesting. (Interesting is more important than pretty at this stage). Oh, and feel free to grab those opacity sliders at this point and mess around with those.

This is what I ended up with. From top to bottom the layer styles are…

Linear Burn

Multiply

Soft Light

Overlay

Normal

The colours are pretty cool already, but we can change that. Create a new layer on the top, flood fill it a colour, (I chose green) and change the layer style to Hue (Or colour).

Now, grab your crop tool, and find a bit of the background that’s interesting, and crop it out.

That’s a perfectly good basic, basic, basic background. And more importantly, you’ve learned about layer styles and opacity, as well as how important it is to work bigger than the planned final size.

Add a few layers, fart around. Just play.

This is nothing good, I was just pissing around for this tutorial.

[The Mask of Norro]

Another neat fact about Illustrator: YOU CAN EDIT FONTS

Well, you can in Photoshop too, but it's so much easier in Illustrator. Also now I'm taking a typography class, so next thing you know I might actually learn how to *MAKE* fonts. Which, honestly, would be awesome for me

EDIT: This was to Idolshizzy, by the way

Continuing so it'll be more geared towards'm though... you SHOULD do fine, like Keith said Mac's are pretty easy to pick up on. Just have to get used to the whole "Ctrl+Click" = "Right Click" thing, and that the apple symbol is, essentially, the equivalent to a PC's Ctrl button.

AJ: You guys DO use PSP in the graphics workforce? Hrm, what for by any chance? If that's the case I might pick up on learning it too, just to stay on the safe side.

Edited October 19, 2006 by Th'Mask O'Cap'n Norro

[Docpepper]

Another neat fact about Illustrator: YOU CAN EDIT FONTS

Well, you can in Photoshop too, but it's so much easier in Illustrator. Also now I'm taking a typography class, so next thing you know I might actually learn how to *MAKE* fonts. Which, honestly, would be awesome for me

[The Mask of Norro]

Doc: I couldn't agree more man. One of the options the Photoshop pen tool is sorely lacking is the ability to alter stroke AND fill colors, or not have one or the other or either. And if it does have that option, I've yet to find it.

But otherwise, it handles completely differently from Illustrator's. I definitely prefer the one in that program.

I'm not too surprised that PSP isn't taken seriously in the workforce all too often... it's not nearly as powerful a program as Photoshop when it comes to graphics. It has potential to make some solid work, but... yeah, just not as professional.

[Guest #AJ styles#]

ya thats what my friends keep telling me experiment this experiment that ive experimented and ill read that text tutorial

[Kaney]

And Kaney, I figured as much... why, considering you yourself are a lemur, it would be of no surprise that you were bringing others in with you

You're a lemur