Part I - Making the skinShort info about marks:
First, we take an image we want to use as mark. In this tutorial I will use the following one:
I will use Adobe PhotoShop 7 for this. First, open the image in PhotoShop. Since the image is 2 colors only, we wont have any problem to select the black parts of the image. We take the Magic Wand tool for this. Configure the tool as you can see below: Now click with the magic wand in the black part of the image. A selection mask should appear around all the black parts. Lets create a new layer from the selection. If the image is in "Indexed Color Mode" we have to convert it to RGB first. To do so, go to the "Image" menu, then "Mode" and then click on "RGB Color". To create the new layer, go to the "Layer" menu, under "New" select "Layer via Copy". There should be two layers in the Layer panel by now: "Background" and "Layer 1". Click on the eye icon to the left of the Background layer on the Layer panel. It should disappear and the white parts of the image should turn transparent. It should look like this: We should try to get the image to the final size first before doing any further changes. The first step is to cut of the transparent space around the black part. Select "Trim" from the Image menu. See below for how to configure the Trim tool. The image is a little bit smaller now, but still too large. We will resize it to 128. Select "Image size" from the Image menu. Make sure to check "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample Image". Use "Bicubic" in the drop down menu. Now enter 128 for "Width". If the value in "Height" becomes larger than 128, enter 128 in the "Height" field instead. None of "Width" or "Height" should be larger than 128. If the image you chose has to much detail it might look crappy now. Not all images are suitable for a mark. This one is still OK. Now we add a new layer with a color fill. This one is temporary only. We need it however. Select "Layer" > "New Fill Layer" > "Solid Color". In the first window that will appear you can just click "OK". After that a color picker will come up. Select a dark color. Black is a good choice. On the layer panel, drag the layer "Color Fill 1" and drop it below our "Layer 1". If you chose black for the fill layer and your image is black too you wont see anything now. We will add an effect to make it visible again. Double click behind the string "Layer 1" on the layer panel. The "Layer Style" panel should pop up. I'll add a white glow to make it show up. Play around with the settings. Every image may require different settings. If you checked "Preview" you can see the changes in your image. After adding the "Outer Glow", the image looks like this (at 300%):
As you can see, the image looks cut off on the edges. To fix this we enlarge the canvas size a bit. Menu > "Image" > "Canvas Size". Check "Relative" and enter a value in the two fields. It doesn't matter if the value is too high. We correct this in the next step. Just make it large enough so the image wont look like cut off anymore. The border may be to large around the actual image. Select "Trim" from the "Image" menu, as we did before, but this time select "Top Left Pixel Color". The border should fit perfectly now. We have to resize the image to our final size. Remember when we resized the image to 128 before? Now do the same and resize the image to 128 again.. The image should be a perfect square (width = height). Probably its not so we correct this by using "Canvas Size" again. Uncheck "Relative" and put 128 for both values. The image should be 128 x 128 in size now. The final step is to remove the temporary layer "Color Fill 1". Click the eye icon to the right of the "Color Fill 1" layer in the layer panel. We end up with this: Without the temporary layer we could have hardly seen our "Outer Glow" effect. (Note: your image should be more centered). Now save the image as Targa (*.tga) and select 32 bit (no compression). The skin is done. The next part will be to convert the tga file to m32. |