Whoo, I'm already starting to have trouble following along with all this. Sorry again for the super long responses.

Raine - Hmm... What happens if you right click the image in Word Pad? Does it give you an options list like "Show Picture Toolbar" or "Format Picture" or something like that? Or, if you can't find those options and do end up downloading Microsoft Office 2007 or whatever it is, I'm pretty sure that the options are really out of place, so you'll have to go hunting to find them in it. Gah, I hated the 2007 version of word so much.... Oh well. I'm sure we'll figure it out.

Raine - For the first two, they look pretty good. However, the borders are looking alittle bit uneven. Next time you add a border to something, try zooming in on the picture, seeing as you like thicker borders. Then, pick a number of pixels. If when you zoomed in you were given scroll bars, always take the scroll bars and check to make sure that they are as far as they can possibly be towards the corner you are working on. Then, click the Paintbrush tool. Take the smallest setting. Whatever number of pixels you want your border to be, start counting that out in the corner. Draw one dot, then another dot diagnol to that, and continue until you have one dot for each pixel you want your border to be. Your corner will look like this:

Then do that to all the other corners. Then, take the single pixel line tool. Start on the dot that's closest to the edge and draw a line going up to meet the dot. Do that for all for sides. Then, start on the next dot. And continue like that so that you know exactly where the border needs to be. It'll help make it be alittle bit more even.

For the blue Sasuke one, it does look wonderful. The only thing I'm noticing is that the borders seem a tad uneven again and in the bottom right corner you left a white spot in the border.

For the one that appears to be done with the spraycan thingy, it's alright that you didn't border it. Some things will look better without borders.

Good idea for the bleach one. Things I'm noticing about it is that the border along the top and the border along the right side don't meet the edge of the signature. Also, there's alot of white along the edges of the picture, so it doesn't blend well. Of course, to get smooth edges on it it would appear that Word is needed (take a look at the tutorial to see how to do it there), but even without word you can still get a fairly rough cutout that doesn't have all that white in it.

^ (Don't laugh, that was really really really old) See? You can still take off some of the white even without word so that the picture blends alittle bit better.

As for saving as something other then a .png, I don't know. Every single photoshop expert I pestered when I was trying to figure out how to save stuff in Gimp said "Save as .png, it's the best". If you really think that saving is messing it up, you could try saving it as .bmp (24-bit Bitmap) and see if that does any better. Of course, Photobucket tries to change .bmp files to .jpg, so that usually doesn't turn out all that wonderfully.
.bmp Photobucket Upload:
.png Photobucket upload:


Chari - If you want me to go ahead and explain how to do fake transperancy then just let me know and I'll type it up for you.

Exidid - Notice along the edges of whatever it is in the first one? There are white specs here and there and basically everywhere. When you're cutting out an image, always draw a box around it and color the box with random colors, checking each time to make sure that the edges don't look bad. Try doing that each time you cut out a picture to check to see if there are any bad spots. Also, that's a nice border for it, even though the colors don't really match up with the rest of it all that well. Also, do you notice that one little line of pixels along the top and left side that's outside of the border? You might wanna consider getting rid of those little lines and make sure that your borders get all the way too the edge of the picture when they're supposed to.

For the next one (I think the character is Zim?), the border doesn't go all the way to the edge along the top. Also, do you see all the white along whoever they are? Try zooming in and using the paintbrush to go along the edges, and follow the tutorial on changing background that was at the bottom of the overlay thingy to get smooth edges along the picture. (If you look above at the cat thingy, you'll see that that one had hard edges to it, and that was because back then I didn't use word when I was messing with stuff) Of course, the Earth looks perfectly normal in that, so that's a plus.

For the Suicune banner, try counting the pixels. Alot of the measurements are really uneven. I know! Let's play a game of count the pixels! ^^

^ Those are the numbers of pixels from the edge to an object. See how the numbers change randomly? If you don't count the pixels, it ends up looking alittle bit sloppy and messy and not as precise.

For the Wolf one, there's a few things I feel like pointing out.
- The wolf's nose. A few dark colored pixels are showing through. I'll assume that for this one you had it set so that all white in the picture was transperant when you were moving the pictures around. Usually if you notice your pixels changing colors when you're moving stuff around, it means that you shound right click hot pink or something like that so that other colors don't show through. Or, if the colors do show through, click the Paint brush tool and put it on the smallest setting. Then zoom in on the spot that turned invisible and color each of those spots white (or whatever color they were supposed to be).
- Along the right side of the picture, there's a two pixel black line. Was that supposed to be there, or did you forget to get rid of it?
- Along the corner of the border where the wolf picture is, the picture shows through on both sides of the border. If you were to cut of the picture at the spot where the border was, it'd probably end up looking nicer.
- For the speech bubble, it looks alright, but there's a white line inbetween the circle part and the triangle. To fix that, zoom in and use the paintbrush to turn that line black so that it doesn't stand out like that. Or, it you mean for the speech bubble to be that way, then it looks fine.
- The picture of the wolf doesn't really blend at all. Of course, it'd be really really hard to actually blend those two pictures together like that, even with Photoshop. Therefore, try using shapes other then squares. When you draw out the square to take a piece of the first image, try adding a circle or something to it to but the wolf's head into. Let's see... How do we explain this? Blah, Example time it is...

^ In that, all the pictures are just sort of there, all slapped together and not blending together. You can easily see that not alot of time was taken. (5 minutes! Whoo!)

^ However, if you draw out a simple shape like that, you can use that when taking bits and pieces out of a picture.

^ And using that shape as a pattern for the images got me that. See how much nicer it looks when the images aren't just there? Um, and transperancy was the absolute last thing added, other then that it was all done in Paint.

In other words, try giving the Wolf's head some sort of shape or outline so that it doesn't look as though it's just there.


Raine - Whoo, I guess we're back to you now. In the first one, the borders are looking alittle bit uneven again.

In the next few, you're learning how to use Apophysis? I've never ever used that program, but some of the stuff I've seen come out of it have looked simply awsome. I'd go ask Lem about getting a teacher for it so that you can do stuff that looks better and won't have to take abstract backgrounds and such from other images. Anyways, borders on the last few are starting to look much better. And no, I don't know anything about Paint Shop Pro.

As for another assignment for you, when you've finally gotten Word, look through the tutorial on Overlaying/background and try to follow what it says in there. It's still a really new idea so I need more people to test it out and make sure it's actually working right.