aliek79

hi all. im quite new to photoshop. I have been using it for a couple of months to make signatures for members on my parenting forum. Here are a few siggys i have made for myslef (i dont want to post other peoples here as i dont have their permission)

how can i improve? all comments and tips will be very much appreciated

retired_paddza

I like the first and third images the best of the bunch. The rain effect is fun... nice that you added the little details like the rain hitting the letters.

When dealing with black and white, using commands like grayscale or desaturate without a little user intervention does about the worst job of making a good looking black and white image (compared to say, black and white film images). It's just a shortcoming of the program. I believe that CS3 has a "black and white" conversion tool that is better than desat... personally I like the L*a*b method for quick conversions. Convert the document to Lab (image > mode > Lab) then go to the channels palette, and delete the a and b channel. Convert back to RGB and add your effects (for something like the above where it's color and black and white, otherwise you can simply convert straight ot grayscale mode). You will almost always have a better looking photo than simply desaturating or converting from RGB to grayscale (and averaging method... which doesn't work). Another good method is to use the channel mixer to custom mix the three rgb channels into one grayscale channel. This method allows you to control how much of the luminosity data from each channel is used so that you can get the photo you want by visual adjustment. It's a bit more tricky to do though and takes some practice.

So far so good, keep it up.

aliek79

hiya, thanks for that. I will try it

Im still getting to grips with all the different effects and stuff, and im sure i'll get there with a bit of practise.

thanks again x

Gaussian

Welcome Kate 8))

A beautiful child and nice pictures, well done. [righton]

Gaussian

What you do is converting the lightness channel into a B&W image, which is pretty much as unpredictable as using desaturate or grayscale mode.
It's very important that a conversion should relate to colors too.