sugarpoultry's homeroom

Well, I'm back and I'm ready to teach anyone willing!

My main focus is Photoshop skills and signature improvement.

I'd like a few students who know enough about photoshop to understand instruction and are willing to learn a few new things about these areas.

Students who know absolutely nothing are also welcome to join, but I will be teaching you photoshop basics before moving on to making signatures. We'll slowly work it in.

As soon as I get a decent amount of members we'll get started with assignments. PM me if you want to join.

Answer these questions:
1 - Do you know how to use Photoshop? If so, how long have you used it?

2 - Show me some of your original works.

3 - Explain why you want to learn.

Students
GKANG
Ja-kun
Fire Bird
nintend06

Assignments

Assignment 1. Sorry folks. Baby keeps you busy.

Anyways, I took a long time thinking about a good assignment. Something that would be beneficial for you and help you guys learn something new about photoshop, and use it to make a good signature. I found just the thing:
actions.

Actions are a useful tool. Basically, it presets
steps you take to make an image look a certain way. Actions are used for photography and special effects mostly, but I use them in my signatures too. You can do a lot of really cool things with actions, so find some and be really creative!

Here is a screen shot example of where an action is in Photoshop

Now, for this, I want you to go to deviantArt.com, search 'photoshop actions' under resources and download a package of actions that look cool. Then, I want you to make a sig using them. No brushes or fancy C4D's. Not all signatures need a bunch of fancy effects. We're gonna hit the basics and do a very simple sig for this assignment.

Find a render or a good photo stock and use an action to get the look you want. I'll do one with you so you have ideas to bounce off. (I will always do the assignment with you).

Now, how you use these is you click your action, (the box with the play botton on it), then it shows you names (just like the picture above) of the action you want. Then it brings a drop down menu, click them in order 1,2,3,4, etc. It does everything for you and you'll see your image change. ^_~

DOWNLOAD and INSTALLATION
After downloading, save them somewhere where you can remember where they are. Saving in your photoshop folders will do of course.

Once you save them onto your computer, upload them using photoshop.


This picture will show you how.


Thanx! ^_^ After all assignments are done, and I've critiqued and helped you with your sigs, we'll move on to the next assignment.

Small note with this assignment: Post the original stock or render so I can see what you did.

My Example:


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Assignment 2. This tutorial will be about tutorials and learning something new. Now, I'll post a few tutorials to choose from. Once is fairly simple, the other one is long and complex. Choose whatever one you want to tackle, or heck, do both!

Here is the kick, follow the tut as close as you possibly can. Trust me. Tuts can be confusing, but you learn a lot from them. They teach you tricks and a lot of cool ideas you can think of later on when you are making sigs on a fly. There are the best resource you can have as a sig maker.

Well, here they are!

Tutorial 1 - Breath

Tutorial 2 - Mariah Carey
(note, in this one, you can use brushes instead of shapes)
If you want to download shapes, just search 'photoshop shapes' in DeviantArt.


Post your results and lets see how you do! And as always, I will do the assignments with you. And for these I'll do both!

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Assignment 3. So I was waiting for inspiration for another assignment, and all the complaints over all the "hard" stuff in the SOTW made me want to start that for an assignment. (And slap certain people upside the head... jk)

So this assignment is all about abstract. We're gonna use C4Ds and lots of them. So make a sig, use a render with C4D's, or use nothing but C4D's. No brushes or clipping masks.

Have fun, be creative. GO!

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Assignment 4. Well, again, thinking of a new assignment. This one is gonna be on pen tool. The pen tool is a very good tool that all photoshop and GIMP users should try.

Here is a really good tutorial on pentooling.

This tutorial is actually by our very own Blue here at ZU. She's awesome and this tutorial helped me so hopefully it can help you too!

Now, this won't be a normal signature, because you can do whatever you want in this signature, as long as its made completely out of pentool shapes. Yah, good luck!

Any questions with the pentool you can PM me or Blue. I'm sure she wouldn't mind.

I'll join (:

I've been using Photoshop for a year, so I know a few things, but nothing professional. Just a few tricks here and there.

(You've probably seen a lot of these)







I'd like to join so I can, well, get better at making sigs. I'd like to open a shop that people will actually want to use sometime, if I ever get good enough.

^Alrighty. I wanted a PM but this is ok too. I'll add you to the list.

Originally Posted by sugarpoultry

^Alrighty. I wanted a PM but this is ok too. I'll add you to the list.

Oh. Well, I kinda PM'd you earlier, kinda. Yeah.
Sorry >_<.

When is the first assignment?

I'll post it up later today. I've got a project and some homework I have to commit to first. >_<

EDIT: *impatience ,_,".*

Dahh.... sorry. I knew what I was going to do but I forgot to post it. I'll go update the first post now.

EDIT: updated first post.

And, here is my sig. I chose a simple stock of Johnny Depp (rawr)

This is what the normal stock looked like:


This is what the actions told photoshop to do with the picture:

I added a thick border and text. You don't have to, but I did.

I used multiple actions, not just one, to get this effect. And if you don't like where its going, stop and try another one. Or, keep bits and pieces, mix and match, etc. Just have fun. ^_^

Holy God. This is crazy. I chose an action I downloaded, pressed play, then a window pops up. Then another. Then another.. Every time I hit okay on a window, another one pops up. It only stops once I hit cancel on one of them, and it's too many options to know what I'm doing.

Do you know what's happening here? Is it supposed to do that?

EDIT: Oooooh. If I keep just pressing 'okay', it's kind of like someone else is doing all the editing for me.

EDIT2: My result. I wasn't sure how strict you wanted it, so I added a couple other things.

Originally Posted by GKANG

Holy God. This is crazy. I chose an action I downloaded, pressed play, then a window pops up. Then another. Then another.. Every time I hit okay on a window, another one pops up. It only stops once I hit cancel on one of them, and it's too many options to know what I'm doing.

Do you know what's happening here? Is it supposed to do that?

Yes, actually its supposed to. It whips you through all the steps and basically does the work for you to get a desired effect.

You can change the options by going to the same place you clicked to load the action. On mine it doesn't do on or off that I can see. O_o though, mine doesn't automatically play. I click each one myself. But I can make it go.

EDIT: Oooooh. If I keep just pressing 'okay', it's kind of like someone else is doing all the editing for me.

EDIT2: My result. I wasn't sure how strict you wanted it, so I added a couple other things.

Yah, they are fun huh!

Well not bad. What other things did you add in? Is the text part of it or was that already there? Can you show me the original stock?

^^^ Well two of the packs I downloaded just zoomed through, but another one I had to keep hitting enter. Did I do okay?

Originally Posted by GKANG

^^^ Well two of the packs I downloaded just zoomed through, but another one I had to keep hitting enter. Did I do okay?

Most of this is for self discovery, so you can't go wrong. Playing around until you get a desired look is pretty much the assignment, but you can do a lot with it, not just black and white.

Try finding some vintage actions and test those out. I used a combination of vintage and photo color effects. They use lighting effects and stuff.

I'd download much more.
Try this one: http://night-fate.deviantart.com/art...ns-13-77790198

I just downloaded this one I'm going to play with: http://huejuice.deviantart.com/art/P...-Pack-90238492

Here's another try. I'm not sure if I need to do more with this or what.



EDIT: The border messed up.

Originally Posted by GKANG

Here's another try. I'm not sure if I need to do more with this or what.

*mistake*

That is very beautiful. And I like the shadow look you gave it. See, yay! So just play around with these and have fun with lots of photos. Now when you make a sig, if you just don't know what else to do with it, add a few actions!

Thanks (:

Now for the strenuous wait for the next task, lol. I'm really into the whole sig making thing right now ,_,".

Originally Posted by GKANG

Thanks (:

Now for the strenuous wait for the next task, lol. I'm really into the whole sig making thing right now ,_,".

Well, even though I don't have another assignment up, you can make sigs and I'll be happy to give you help on them. And I have my next assignment already thought up, so maybe I'll just post it anyways. Not tonight though.

*yayz, I gotz my banner back! *

Ahh, now that I've seen your example I have more of an idea. I'll edit this with another attempt later on. Sorry if I'm spamming up your homeroom with numerous sigs for one assignment >_<.

EDIT: I probably like this one the best. I used a photo that my girlfriend took, even if it isn't the best of quality ^_^.

What is the focal point of this sig? What is the image? The colors are kind of messed up and the font/text doesn't really add anything.

Well I really just used this image because it's personal. The colours are messed up because it was taken on a video camera, and the focal point is supposed to be the eye.

If you can't tell, it's my girlfriend holding Piplup :>

Originally Posted by sugarpoultry

Yah, they are fun huh!

Well not bad. What other things did you add in? Is the text part of it or was that already there? Can you show me the original stock?

It was a render image, which I used an action.
Then:

- added the text by selecting areas with the polygon lasso thing
- clipping mask the text onto it after changing the perspective.
- added an RE5 background image too, as well as some sharpens and blurs.





Any idea when the next assignment will be? It seems to be just me in here for now.

Originally Posted by GKANG

It was a render image, which I used an action.
Then:

- added the text by selecting areas with the polygon lasso thing
- clipping mask the text onto it after changing the perspective.
- added an RE5 background image too, as well as some sharpens and blurs.





Any idea when the next assignment will be? It seems to be just me in here for now.

I think you can do much more with that sig, but the render is too big. Space is nice to have, and you don't always have to fill it in. It's hard to sometimes tell when it needs to be filled.

Thing is, there's nothing special about this signature. It's not eye catching, its not spectacular.

I want you to try something wild. Go crazy. Experiment. Just go nuts using everything; filters, c4d's, clipping masks, vectors, brushes, and now actions, etc.



As for the next assignment. I think I'm going to focus on tutorials, and learning a few things from other great sig makers. Learning to follow tuts helps you learn new things that stick with you and that you can apply to any sig making. I'll update the first post with some Photoshop sig tutorials I want you to try.