Sig/Avatar tutorials by the makers [Index in First Post]

[Runa]

can anybody gimme some good tutorial or a good way to combine 3 or more pic within your board work ? it's a pain to do that, especialy when they have a different color... maybe looking at my sigs atm will give u the imagination on how to do it >.<

well 1 render or 2 is normal, but 3 or more is frustating and make your adrenaline gone over the limit l, not to mention the blending and also the text which is in one way it's suitable, but in other ways it doesn't match the other picture.... grrr might also scrap my current sigs i think

[sasuke13]

Hi, i can anyone make a tutorial on how to make an animated siggy with animated gifs that have effects on it? I only see one tutorial on here that talks about gradients and text, but that's all. And I'm still trying to learn these things.

[KiNA]

What kind of effect? There not much effect can be done with 50Kb limit here, hence the limited tutorial on it.

[sasuke13]

One's that look kinda like Riker's Shuffle flip-banner effects, or sumthin like that, oh and I know there's limit's here, but I meant banners for limit-free places.

[felix]

T_There is no such place...

As for Riker's works... trial and error. I don't think he uses some quick method, most likely just works on it until he gets it right.

[sasuke13]

(placing them on MS)

Are there any other types on animation banners? (other than the gradient gifs and Riker's trail and error) that haven't been recognized or used as a tutorial?

[Riker]

Originally Posted by sasuke13

One's that look kinda like Riker's Shuffle flip-banner effects, or sumthin like that, oh and I know there's limit's here, but I meant banners for limit-free places.

I gotta rewrite that tutorial someday. Old one got wiped out in the last forum nuke.

Originally Posted by Cats

As for Riker's works... trial and error. I don't think he uses some quick method, most likely just works on it until he gets it right.

For the flippy effect it's mainly tinking with the transform->perspective in Photoshop. There are no hard numbers to remember, I just tweak the values until the animation looks smooth. It all boils down to how many frames you are setting aside for your animation.

Originally Posted by sasuke13

Are there any other types on animation banners? (other than the gradient gifs and Riker's trail and error) that haven't been recognized or used as a tutorial?

I suppose you could regard this as a tutorial. The original post was from my thread explaining how I did my old Ayu flimstrip sig.

Originally Posted by Riker

Ah, I was experimenting with a different animation technique when I came out with that effect. There's actually 2 steps to it.


Step 1: Divide the entire animation into 3 parts. Notice that each part doesn't have a complete loop. The first frame of the 2nd part is actually the next sequence after the last frame of the 1st part. (Confusing?)





Step 2: Tween the movement such that the 1st part moves to the 2nd part's position to create the effect of a continuous loop.





After that, I just do up the rest of the sig and tilt the animation a bit (then comes the optimisation part to keep it under 50, 000 bytes. )

End result:

[sasuke13]

Cool, ic. Just a question on step 2. Exactly how do I tween the movement to make it move wutever way I want it? (is it done in photoshop or imageready, frames? Pentool etc. blah)

[KiNA]

Both PS and Ir can tween. Its in the animation window, look for it :x

[saphyre]

Hey, I was wondering if anyone could write up a tutorial on how to make eyes blink from a still image.
I remember someone making one from the Haruhi scan, think it was either KiNa or Riker.

Thanks in advance.

[KiNA]

Gonna tease you a bit


-OR-





I suggest you wait for Riker flippy sig tutorial. Its actually the same thing .. Go bother him to remake it

I'm too lazy and too busy.. either one works

[Ultenth]

This is such a great resource, after reading through it a bit I've decided to try my hand at making more of my own sigs and avatars, you all have inspired me! Hehe.

Just finished my first attempt at an animated gif, I'll probably bust it out officially once Halloween is done. Any suggestions are most welcome!

I used the tutorial that explains how to do the rounded edges and bordering, seemed to be pretty easy, big props to the clear and well done explainations.



Problem I'm coming across is a lot of the anime I have, and a lot of the pictures, are all widescreen, which unless I can crop a ton of it off, makes it pretty hard to make a nice square avatar. Maybe I'll just try being more aggressive with my cropping or something.

[saphyre]

Originally Posted by Ultenth

Problem I'm coming across is a lot of the anime I have, and a lot of the pictures, are all widescreen, which unless I can crop a ton of it off, makes it pretty hard to make a nice square avatar. Maybe I'll just try being more aggressive with my cropping or something.

Well, with that one, you could probably crop the right side all the way to Sayuri's shoulder, you don't exactly need to see the whole of Mai's arm.
You can also probably crop a bit of the left side, chopping off a bit of the ribbon doesn't really matter. This is if you want to make it 100x100 of course.
As for its animation, you can probably try reducing the delay time abit, it looks abit 'laggy' as of now. The quality and such is pretty good though.
To be totally honest, this is alot better than my first animated gif. My one was dull with bad quality and a thick black border and a constant bad loop, so yeah, it's not bad.

[Ultenth]

Originally Posted by saphyre

Well, with that one, you could probably crop the right side all the way to Sayuri's shoulder, you don't exactly need to see the whole of Mai's arm.
You can also probably crop a bit of the left side, chopping off a bit of the ribbon doesn't really matter. This is if you want to make it 100x100 of course.
As for its animation, you can probably try reducing the delay time abit, it looks abit 'laggy' as of now. The quality and such is pretty good though.
To be totally honest, this is alot better than my first animated gif. My one was dull with bad quality and a thick black border and a constant bad loop, so yeah, it's not bad.

Yeah, thats kinda what I was thinking, I was just kinda worried about cutting too much off because I'd chopped quite a bit already. Not sure what you mean by delay, are you referring to the time before the chop happens? I wasn't sure about that because if looped it looks kinda silly to see her chopping really quickly over and over, but I'll revisit that again and see what I think.

[Ultenth]

Anyone have any suggestions on what to do if I'm trying to render a pic that has the background color (which is yellowish) bleed into the character I'm trying to render? I'm currently just kind of going back and forth using both the eyedropper and spray paint with a very low opaque setting, and using blur also with fairly low setting. Any better suggestions on what I can use to try to phase out the yellowish tone and bring up more of the colors that should be on the character (which in this case are salmon and blueish tones)?

[KiNA]

erm.. dont really get what you trying to do here.. Try this.. put a mask on the top layer... then use gradient BW on it... black will hide the portion that you want to remove then fade in..

Still, seriously dont know what you trying to achieve here

[felix]

He's trying to remove a character from a scan/whatnot.
Apparently, he's having trouble when it comes to removing the background tone overlapping the character.

Personally I think the simple/lazy approach would be to leave it and find another scan or just alter it's tone to something acceptable and use it with a appropriate background.

[KiNA]

OOO.. I think we both wrong.. He wanted to fade the yellowish part BUT wanted the blue to be more prominent !

Then the answer is Hue/Saturation thingie!

[Lord1412]

I want to ask one quetion .... can i know the method how to reduce the size of JPEG image without spoiling the quality because i don't see many solution here >.< besides Kira_Naruto's adjustment in Hue/Saturation, but making adjustment in Hue/Saturation really doesn't make a lot different... sorry for my noobish question

[Sephi]

Originally Posted by Lord1412

I want to ask one quetion .... can i know the method how to reduce the size of JPEG image without spoiling the quality because i don't see many solution here >.< besides Kira_Naruto's adjustment in Hue/Saturation, but making adjustment in Hue/Saturation really doesn't make a lot different... sorry for my noobish question

Have you tried Save for web If not than try it.

If you have. With minor blurring you can reduce size to. But it's notable. Otherwise if you want to go extreme, try JPEG Optimizer. It can compress more than photoshop save for web. And has a handy feature which allows you to select parts of a jpeg you want to compress.

And well there are limits compression. But usually photoshop Save for web is good enough. What image is it that you want to compress and to which size did you want it?