Photoshop Beginings

[Dante]

Or, for a more perfect and more better looking way. Once you have your cut out image, hold down CTRL and click on the layer of your picture, then right click on your worksapce and Select inverse. Now go to the Selection dropdown menu at the top tool bar, and select Feather, then use a small amount(around2 or 3 Pxl) and press delete. This will give you a smooth outline that blends in with the background.
Of course you can up the amount to is flows with the background some more.
There are more conventional way of doing this, like I know, but this way is a nice, simple easy way for beginers to learn to use Selections.

And try to stear away form using the Blur, smudge and sharpen tool. Use the filters for bluring and sharpening.

Before Feathering
http://yaay.us/~angel/Tut/Feather%20...re-feather.jpg
After Feathering
http://yaay.us/~angel/Tut/Feather%20...xl-feather.jpg
With mild smoke effects
http://yaay.us/~angel/Tut/Feather%20...ke-effects.jpg

Thanks 4 that Dante. I was looking through my thread, and I have noticed that I have come a long way . Just wanted to thank you guys

I was bored as helll last night .An then this song from one of my favorite bands came on my winamp. If you hadn't guessed already..it was vacuume bag by stroke 9. I <3 them. anyways I was super bored as well so I descided, "Hey why not make a banner!". So here it is. It looks a little crapy compared to the FF 7 one, but oh well.

[Angantyr]

Have you played with the filters yet? They are good for small parts and such and you can make some basic but decent backrounds like this and make basic stuff like this (Don't worry I was only playing around trying to figure it out )

Yeah I have kinda dabbled into it, but I have not full blown tested all the wear out. I would have to set some time apart from my regular banner making to just go in an fiddle with things in there. The other night I was just pretty bored. All in all I like the banner you have going up there. Very well done. I think I filtered the band picture on mine, but I don't know if the word was filter. Basicaly I just took a picture off of a cover shoot they did, and then tried to make it look smudged an weird. Now that I look at that...I can see I did my job. Cause it happens to look weird XD.

[Angantyr]

Filters are things that give it effects like a Grain Filter makes it look like something from a movie. The one I used there I think was called shattered glass or something. There is heaps of them from fine tuning to liquifying etc..

Okay...I think I used mosaic then. I was going to go with charocoal or chrome, but it came out to darkly. I was getting kinda worried their for a minute. There is already a S~load of filters XD> anymore an I would be going out og my mind. My favorite thing to screw with is the shadows...alot of the layout preferences. Like stroke, and outter glow. I don't know what kinda of banner I want to do next though. I am sure I want more of a challenge.

I am very excited about this new banner. I have to resize it, but for now it is like this. I will be resizing it though....in about two minutes after this post. I am just so excited about it that I had to post. The idea of this banne came to me when I got really into an online game called Trickster. It is a basic RPG that lets you Lv up faster than runescape, and has better graphics then FFL. In my opinion. Anyways...the two chracters that I have on here is the two Charm characters in the game. I myself play the cat, and scorpian plays the raccoon. I took multiple pieces of images I had to basicaly scrounge for. Everything on this piece has been cropped from otehr pictures, and finely tuned in some way or another. Take the name for example, I went ahead an slapped outerglow on that thing. Before it looked way to drab, and did not shine as brightly as the other pictures. So it stood out really bad. Adding outerglow made it appear as if it was not so blurry. If you look carefully you can see blur, but not at first glance. Okay so off to resizing it...I want to put it as my sig...so ^_^

[Dante]

My $0.02.

First thing i notice is the outerglor around the text "Trickster", Waaay too much noise, and its distracts. I needs to be more flowing, less noise.
2nd thing, The racoon dude, could do with being smoothened up around the edges. Especcialy around the tail area where it meets the legs.
I see nothing wrong with the Neko though.

All in all, good work! One of, if not thee, best you've done so far!

[Scorpian]

Hey Sweetie, That new banner looks awesome! I'm surprised and glad you included my char in it as well ^^ Maybe someday they'll make pics of the variants available to the public so that the sig could look moer like our chars do. But hey it looks great! Your way more advanced in PS skills than i thought XD

alrighty well, To start with I took the noise completely out of the picture. I actually also think it looks better this way. However it was harder for the raccoon. I tried to sharpen the image an erase some of the old background I saw, but it didn't come out quite as I planned. I am my own worst critic though so tell me what you think.

Scorpian: U just want in my pants XD. <3 you

I got bored today....Usually an occurance of the weekend. So I descided to whip a banner up. I wanted to do something simple an small...that would be able to fit on a small banner forum. Not that I will use it for that, but yet again I just wanted to see how I was with smaller images. this one came to me from an off shoot of a DarkStalker game. I play the turbo gem fighter with one of my favorite characters Morgan..or something like that. She is a vampire like creature. An she naturally belongs to the game I mentioned above. So here it is.

Originally Posted by The Welsh Paddy

.

http://www.misprintedtype.com

and

http://www.dafont.com

There's only a few fonts that are free on Misprintedtype, but they are very interesting fonts. And... dafont.com has a HUGE collection of fonts, all free. There you can get practically any font you want, like computer game themed fonts, and so on.

I had a question about this. I downloaded soem fonts, but they go to my desk top as thumbnails. How do I get them into my Photoshop?

[Dante]

You need to copy and paste them into your font folder in your control pannel.

Okay I stumbled onto this while searching for random images. I love to make banners no matter the n00by status I have. Well it started off with a plain image shown here:http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/8042/ddwu4.jpg

So I slapped some of the new text I downloaded on it. Yes I put that on there, and yes I think it is funny as hell. That is just my sense of humor though....I am not expecting a lot of others to be very pleased with it, but I never cared about that before. Now onto the rest.I first began to search of a border like I usually do...or I just use plain stroke. Instead I stumbled on a handy little tutorial. An presto! I actually knew enough about PS to know what they were talking about. An that is more impressive than the actual time it took to follow them. Now the photo of the picture with the boreder is below. Not saying that it is anything fancy or even good, but I am getting into more of the difficult things about Photoshop instead of leaning on my own curiosity to do it. Now...In the middle of making the grundge border it starts to look a little like this. No image was added to this to make this occur. Just plain Filter an backgrouds...an such an so on.
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/5...dercopylj7.jpg

I also did a search of my own, and thought I would dabble in the art of burnt paper. Also shown below. I put them all together ..not becuase it looked good...I very well know it doesn't...but becuase I wanted to show everyone that at least the pictures I am now doing are able to have more substance in them. Now if only I can find out how to work with a Gif. I will be even better off, Lol. BTW if you look at the border around the black angel you will be able to see the grudge border. The burnt paper did not do the same to the layer as to my image.