GiMP Forum Signature Tutorial
Required materials:
- GiMP (available from gimp.org)
- screenshot of your toon (it is easier if your character is in the foreground with some plain background, such as the walls of your house)
- some imagination
Ok, first things first you're going to want to open your screenshot file using GiMP, which can be done by opening GiMP and going to File>Open then directing GiMP to your screenshot from there. I'm going to be using a screenshot of one of my guildies for this tutorial. Then what you're gonna do is create a new file for the sig by going to File>New.
A dialogue box with options will appear, for now just concentrate on the size which is limited by the forum rules to 400x120 pixels.
Which gives us this:
Now, reselect your screenshot image (you can do this by clicking on the image frame or what have you) and go to Edit>Copy Visible.
Now go back to your sig file and choose Edit>Paste as> New Layer
Selecting the move tool from the GiMP toolbox move the image around in the frame until you get your toon where you want it in frame. If the picture in the frame is too big to fit what you want in the frame you can scale it down using Layer>Scale Layer. Remember you can always cancel what you're doing or correct it using Edit>Undo <operation>.
Now, since GiMP has no filter for extracting the foreground from the image you're going to have to make a choice. If your toon is standing in front of a cool looking background and you like the image I'm going to suggest that you keep it. If you want a more stylized background there are a couple of ways to do it, I'll be showing you one of them.
Find the path selection tool in your toolbox, and what you'll be doing is creating a path around the area you want to keep. Each click of the mouse will add a new path anchor directly from where you placed the last one, so you can follow along the outline pretty easily:
Be sure to create a path all the way back to where you started from (say along the bottom of the image where the frame ends) and now you're going to create a selection from your path by going to Select>From Path.
Once that's done invert the selection by going to Select>Invert.
Now, select the eraser tool (you can scale the size up) and erase the image around your now protected toon. You should end up with something like this:
Now go to your Layers panel and hit the Create New Layer button:
You'll need to move this below your toons layer. You can make your toon invisible to make the rest of this easier by clicking on the eyeball next to the layer name. Make sure you've selected your new layer before continuing though.
Here is where your imagination comes in. Choose a brush and liberally do whatever to your new layer. Just make sure it's visually interesting. You can download custom GiMP brush sets from DeviantArt.com, I chose the same blood spatter brush that I used for my own sig. Once you've gotten what you want you're going to colorize it by selecting Color>Colorize.
Play around with the different values until you get something you like.
I ended up with this:
I felt the green went well with Aash's armor.
Making Aash visible again I have this:
Almost there but not quite. At this point you can also play around with the various filters on your background layer such as Blur or Lens Flare just look under Filter and make sure your layer is selected in the layer panel.
Because we want the toon to be identified as well as the guild he's in and whatever other information you want to include, we're going to add text. Simply choose the text tool, and select an area in the image for the text. A little dialogue box will appear where you can type in your text. Under the tool is where you can choose the font, font size, and even pick the color for your text.
I stuck with his name and guild affiliation.
Creating a border is pretty simple. Choose Select>All and then Select>Border and choose your border size in pixels (I wouldn't go past five though). You can then brush in whatever color you choose. For a nice effect you can create a stripe down the center. Simply create a new border by Select>All and Select>Border and choose a border of 3 pixels. Colorize your selection (like you did with the background). Then do it again only select a border of 2 pixels and brush your color back in. Voila, a nice one pixel stripe right down the center of your border
Now choose File>Save As, choose a file name and add .jpeg to the end of the name. This tells GiMP to save the file as a JPEG which will flatten the image (remove the layers) and save it in a format usable by the forums. Also be sure to choose the location for the file to be saved so you know where to look for it.
I ended up with this:
Now go to the RoM forums, log in, and go to User CP>Edit Signature and near the bottom there is a space where you can upload your new sig by browsing to it's location on your pc and hitting the upload button. Add any additional text you want (only one pic is allowed per sig though) and then hit save.
Enjoy your new sig!
Quoted from "GarySandstorm;428368"
Nice Tut Al
