Can Someone Make Me A Sig

[Samurai]

pol - What are you using to create the sigs you posted?

Adobe Photoshop? Paint Shop Pro? Other?

[pol]

Originally posted by blunt on tour+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (blunt on tour)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>The transparency problem, I think, is caused by too low a quality in the &#39;save for web&#39; stage
.....
I think the jagged edges are down to pasting a 72dpi image onto a 300dpi canvas - if I paste &#39;like to like&#39; it looks a lot better, but I still get the problem if I transform the image by pulling it or pushing it - I think a lot of that&#39;s down to trying to manipulate a low rez image.[/b]

yep the output settings will affect the edges/shadows because of the lower amount of colours etc, but there should still be transparency - if there&#39;s not it must be a setting. sorry if it sounds obvious, but is the transparency box ticked in the saving options? (photoshop) -



the jagged edges will be as you said, importing the lower res image

a way to get round that, if its not a photo - and you have the time , like with a design or shape you want to import, is to drag it on to your higher res pic, transform it as big as you need even though it&#39;s big and blocky, then turn down the opacity in that layer, just visible enough to work on top of it

then just use that layer as a template/guide and draw the image again on a new layer using paths, marquee selections with a stroke etc, then just fill it with gradients/textures/fills or whatever. using Mïcrösöül°V³&#39;s sig as an example, if you saw a photo of a tattoo with the design you like, just drag the layer in, blow it up, drop the opacity and &#39;trace&#39; over the image, then you have a good, big image that wont get messed up as much by transforming

illustrator is ideal for doing this, photoshop is good enough for tracing round designs/logos but illustrator can get as good as real photos, as its vector based and because of it&#39;s tools and gradients. it can be fairly complicated, but there are some excellent tutorial programs and even 2/3 hour videos on emule etc, look for &#39;adobe illustrator/photoshop total training&#39;, lots of it around. overkill for what we&#39;re talking about, but it&#39;s excellent

Originally posted by blunt on tour@
I&#39;ve since tried optimizing in Imageready, using the export optimized wizard tool thing (whatever it&#39;s called) and it seems a lot better.

not sure if you already do this with imageready, but i find it the easiest way to make changes is to have the &#39;optimize&#39; box checked in the &#39;window&#39; menu (not sure if it&#39;s on by default), so you have this toolbox to work with..



..then it&#39;s easy to make any changes - and to see if it&#39;s good/small enough with the settings used, go to &#39;file&#39; menu, &#39;preview in..&#39; your browser. mess around with all the settings/levels like &#39;lossy&#39;, &#39;dither&#39; etc till you get what you need

and with the animated sig, thats just 2 basic flash text effects with this - magic flare converted to gif&#39;s with this - magic swf2gif then tidied up and optimized with imageready

<!--QuoteBegin-Samurai
pol - What are you using to create the sigs you posted?

Adobe Photoshop? Paint Shop Pro? Other? [/quote]

i did those with photoshop Samurai, radial gradients on the bottom layer of both, and the text &#39;streaks&#39; on the blue one are &#39;alien eye candy - motion trail&#39; plugins

the tribal thing is just filled circles/elipses using the selection tool then filling, then move the selection a bit and hit backspace to delete the selection, leaving just the edge, then adding some layer styles like bevels and shadows from the &#39;layer&#39; menu

main thing is to start them off much bigger than they&#39;ll be when finished, like 3x or more. then before you resize to finish, &#39;flatten&#39; or &#39;merge visible&#39; from the layer menu, otherwise the layer effects stay big and the bevels etc look out of proportion

[blunt_on_tour]

Thanks for the detailed reply, pol

Yeah, I always have the transparency box checked. Guess I&#39;ll just have to sit down and experiment a bit more to see what&#39;s going wrong. I&#39;ll read what you&#39;ve said in more detail later - right now I&#39;ve got to go to work (late already )

Thanks for the help.

[blunt_on_tour]

Phew...it&#39;s taken me a while to get back and read the post thoroughly: I&#39;ve been working on making a website in Photoshop and then slicing it up into a web template using Imageready - gave me a few headaches, because it&#39;s the first time I&#39;ve tried to do it, but I think it looks OK, and I got a real buzz out of seeing it up and working on the server with all the button rollovers in action. Made the mistake of doing button rollovers before I&#39;d finished editing the slices, so the javascript got thrown all out of whack when I optimised it

I&#39;m not sure if I&#39;ve got Illustrator; I don&#39;t think so, but I&#39;ll have a look around for it. It&#39;s a big con that they don&#39;t give you everything you need in Photoshop really, isn&#39;t it? For what they expect you to pay for it, you should get the full deal.

Thanks again for the tips - I&#39;ll try them out next time I fire it up