Since some of you may have photoshop, but you maybe unable to get the effects you want out of it I have decided to give a tutorial for you. This information comes from many sites on Photoshop.



First and foremost...Open Photoshop.

Select "new" then you are going to want the size at about 400 (wide) by 100 (high) (pixels use drop down)

RGB mode 72 DPI (max a monitor can display with out stretching any thing more is really a waste.)


Now...I hope at this point you have some images you wish to use for your sig...Open those in a new window.

Now I???m going to say you have 3 images open and one box for the finished sig.

Open the image you want for the background of your sig. If you wish to use only a portion of the image skip down to Cropping, Selecting, and cutting.... If you want to use the image as a whole but it doesn't fit read on.

Select Image > Image size (NOT canvas size)

And once again set it to 400 (wide) by 100 (high) (pixels use drop down)?? 72 DPI (resolution)

And hit ok...you will now see that the image you have chosen has shrank...this can cause unwanted distortion. Use wisely.

Cropping, Selecting, and cutting.

Photoshop has many different ways to select something in an image.




But the top area is all about selection something in an image.

Ignore the "slice tool" as that has to do with webpage creation...

What you want is the Magic wand (mostly) Its the easiest way to select

Click the Magic wand (in the above pic it???s the one that is depressed.)

Now as you will see you have a few options for that tool.



First you will want to set it to about 5-10 Tolerance, With out going into detail its basically the setting that determines how much give the tool has when selecting and object. The wand tool is best suited for selecting portions that are not very complicated or have one over all color surrounding the portion of the image you want to ???cut out??? Ignore anti-aliased and the rest as its not really that important and I don???t feel like explaining them right now. =) That will help you do basic cutouts. Click in side of the ???Blue Square??? and you will see little ???ant??? running in a row. The inside of that is the part you have selected. If you want to reverse that Hit[ Select > Inverse ] at the top of your screen and you will have every thing outside of the previous selection selected.

Hit Alt-z to ???Undo??? (Ctrl-Alt-Z for going back more than once)



That???s fine for simple images like red and blue squares and you can tweak the tolerance and keep trying the selection over and over again to get different results. The more you up the tolerance the more the ants will run around???even threw different colors.

Using Quick mask for advanced selections

So say you have an image like this???



For selecting something like this the wand may not work for you as it goes by similar?? ???pixels???.

So I recommend going into Quick mask mode mode.

Hit the box with the circle in it near the bottom of the tool bar.


What this mode does is allows you to ???paint??? the areas you want to keep, Slect the paint brush tool.

(Second section down in the tool bar on the right hand side of the tool bar)

Now Paint the ???zombie??? with the brush. You can right click on the image with the paintbrush selected to change the brush size to get those hard to reach areas. I only recommend that new users use the ???hard??? edged brushes because if you use the more fuzzy ones you may end up with undesired results and missed areas in the selection.


As you paint you will see that the area you are painting gets a red ???hue??? to it.


The red areas are what you will be keeping. So paint all of the zombie the best you can, you can use the eraser to clean up if you happen to go out side of the lines.(that would be the tool that looks like one of those old school pink erasers)


Once you are done exit Quick mask mode by hitting the other square next to the one you hit to enter it. AND YOU HAVE ANTS!

Then hit [Select > Feather] (2 Pixels). Then [Select > Inverse] so you select only the area you want.



Then hit Cut. (CTRL-C is copy and works also) Click on the 400 X 100 window you have with your background image, and hit Ctrl-V (Paste) and BAM!

At this stage if you look at your layers list you now have two layers.

The one with the Blue bar over it is the one you have slected.Ues the move tool to grab anything on that layer and move it around. (Everything on that layer will move)


And you can move it around all day long.

This should get most of you started making really snazzy sigs, I didn???t spend much time on one thing here because you need to experiment a little so you can get your desired effect. One thing I do want to stress is that when your panting with the paint brush in Quick mask mode its very important to take your time. Because selection can make or break you image

GOOD LUCK!

Question:"Oh yeah, a question. Something I'm having difficulty with in Photoshop is image sizing. I can't figure out how to resize something I've cut out."

Answer:
There are so many ways to do its not funny. What I think you were doing is cutting out something and placing it in a new file resizing it and then placing it in the file you wanted it in on a new layer....that is one way to do it.

But a lesser known secret is that the move tool. ??(That
guy) can also resize tings. Make sure that what you want to resize is
on its own layer, then get the "move" tool. at the top of the Photoshop
window should be some choices...the one you want is "show bounding box"
click that and you will get clickable boxes in the 4 corners of the
item in that layer...use those to resize it and hit enter when your
done. (Tip: hold shift in to make the resizing??uniform).??hope that helps.

Question:
"Does anyone know, how do we make borders for the sig with
photoshop? And how do you get an outline around the lettering in your
sig???Thanks."??Answer:??Place
the text on its own layer. Then in the layers window you will see what
looks like a circle with a fancy F in it. Hit that. Select "stroke"
make this will pop open the layer style window. make sure that on
the??left hand side you are on "stroke" . on the right hand side of
that window you can make your choices.??Play around with it to get different effects.