Photoshop Tutorial: Soft Plasticy Banner Or Sig Smooth on the eyes :)

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

Soft plasticy banner or sig.

Firstly, we're gonna open Photoshop. You can probably do this in Fireworks, Paint Shop Pro or PhotoImpact as well, but I don't own those programs (ok I do have Fireworks) so I can't be sure. Also note that the graphics used are scaled, sometimes I used lower settings to keep the file size down.

Make a new Document, of your desired size. Bear in mind when choosing the size that you will be putting a slogan, logo or whatever in there and that it has to be in proportion. I opted for 1024x200 because I wanted a nice webbanner.

 

Now you face a choice... The color. Choose your color wisely, but if you don't like it, you can easily change it It's just the background layer that's colored to be honest. With your color chosen, "Flood Fill" your canvas with that color.

 

Now make a new layer, set your foreground color to white and use your "Brush" to make white dots on the edges of your canvas. That should give you :

 

Change the blending mode to soft light, if you feel the effect is not strong enough, you can hit Ctrl+J and duplicate the layer.

 

Now you should have something like this :

 

The next step may sound complex, but I don't always follow the easiest route.

Make a new layer again, you still have white as foreground color and select the "Rectangle Tool" (Shapes part). This you will have to set to Path which is done in the area just below the menubar.

 

You can now make a rectangle that covers about 75% from the top to bottom. Then you right click on the area you've just made a path, and select "Make Selection"

 

(this works with the rectangle selection tool as well, but the goal of a tutorial is to learn new things). Now you will see the marching ants on your canvas

 

You will now fill the selection with a Gradient Foreground to transparent, the "Gradient" hides under the "Paint Bucket", again at the top of everything you can select which gradient, use your dropdown box to select, "Foreground Color to Transparent". Then you click and drag the mouse vertically STRAIGHT (very important) to about 25% past the selection ants, this will ensure that your gradient fill looks good.

 

Change the opacity to about 40%, if you want to increase the effect, hit Ctrl+J and move that layer up a little bit.

 

 

Now I have added my text in several layers, the name/logo can be quite big in WHITE (do not use a lot of colors in this, it will turn a nice smooth banner/sig into plain ugly trash), set the opacity to about 29%. Make sure you use a pixel font, or something NON serif, stick to terminal font like. This just isn't the graphic to use a curly font

 

I added another layer for a small slogan, or something witty and made that smaller and less transparent (opacity about 55% or even more. This should be smaller in font size as well.

 

Last thing I did, was add a swirl, curl, wave thing to it, to have some sort of canvas filling. If you don't like the background color, you can easily change it by Flood Filling the background layer with another color.

 

Here's my original :

And the same with a different background color :

[OpaQue 15]

I liked the Background.. Looks CoOL!

[alis 0]

Ah, there's something more you could do to make it more squishy looking. In step ten when you do that gradient, instead of doing it in that rectangular selection, try using the elliptical marquee tool. That'll give it a little curve and make it look rounded.

 

This is pretty small, but you get the picture: