Yet another gallery of my sigs..

[gamerman4]

Originally posted by Blue_Strife
Eh possibly... I dunno, guess it's my tendency to not use brushes much. -shrug-

That and they're pretty big for sigs dude. o_o...

I like big sigs and I have a knack for compression since I have 26.4k dial-up. Look at my current sig, it is easily bigger than urs by far and only 1KB bigger filesize. When I make the most voted on one into my sig it will shrink considerably.

These aren't 3D fractal. Most people at DeviantArt use a prog called Apophysis to make fractal brushes.

[gamerman4]

Ok ill just use a 200px square for demonstration purposes.

Step 1: Fractal
Usually fractals are best when white on a black background so fill the background black and put your fractals on a new layer.


Step 2: Glow
Hit ctrl + J to duplicate the fractal layer. Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur
Anywhere between 5-12 on the blur is good depending on how you want your blur. If you want it to glow more hit ctrl + J on the blurred layer. Merge any glow layers you make.



Step 3: Color
Make a new clean transparent layer. I started just using a soft round brush (50-300px) so you can use that. Make the layer blend mode "Color". Now pick a color you want and brush on the new layer. It turns out best if you just do spots where there is most glow and leave dimm spot either uncolored or less colored. Also dont brush it, just click in different areas.


Step 4: Accent Glows
This is optional but can really make the overall look very nice.
Make a new layer, blend mode overlay, and use a darker colored brush than the previous. On this I originally used a light blue, for the accents I'm using more of a true blue. Use a smaller brush size too for the accents. Dab the brush on major glow areas to intensify the color.



Step 5:  Making It Stand Out
Make a new layer and fill it black. Now change the blend mode to Vivid light. Hit ctrl + U and make lightness around 30-40 (I used 35). This really makes your major areas stand out. Now make your brush about the same size as you did on your color layer and make it a very light grey color (but not white I used CFCFCF). Enable the airbrush and set flow to 40%. Brush over you major areas and make it really stand out.


Step 6: Final Touch-Up
Make a new layer and fill it black. Make the opacity about %30 and make the blend mode overlay.

Thats about it and here is my final peice.


Some variations to this tutorial you can do:
-experiment with the gaussian blur
-experiment witht he Color layer. You dont have to use the soft round brush. This is the actual color layer on the #4 sig you all like.

-just mess around with other settings.

Also, do you recommend me post this in the tutorials thread? It seems like it is only for RM2K tutorials...i dunno

[EXO Muffin]

Could you link some fractal brush downloads that are PS6 compatible? All the other kinds won't load on my PS.

EDIT: Turns out I have 6. It just looks like 5 sometimes.

[I Have a Sandwich]

Originally posted by EXO Muffin
Could you link some fractal brush downloads that are PS5 compatible? All the other kinds won't load on my PS.

PS5? No wonder your stuff seems kinda iffy.

[gamerman4]

PS5? You aren't gonna find anything compatible with that. PS5 is old (I got PS7 4-5 years ago). Also, a lot of the brushes form deviant art were only compatible with CS and CS2 so I ahd to use a program called "PSD Viewer" to convert the brushes to PNG and then I used an Action macro in PS7 to make each PNG a brush. I combined all my fractal brush sets and the ABR file is 135MB. I have about 800 fractal brushes. I dunno if PS5 supports "actions" but its really easy to do if you want to convert new brushes to old format. A decently fast comp is useful when converting a crapload of PNGs to brushes though.

[EXO Muffin]

Yep, I didn't buy PS any time recently. My mom got it several years ago, and it costs a LOT OF MONEY for the new kinds, so she just stuck with that. I wish I had Illustrator.

And, 135 MB for a brush set?! Wow. My computer has only 4 GB total C drive capacity. New computers have, like, 40 GB. I'm really amazed. My computer sucks.

Yes, PS6 has actions. I don't know how most work, so, could you format some brushes into a simpler or more compatible format for me?

[I Have a Sandwich]

You need to download 7. The only reason you need to ever buy PS is if youre doing comercial work with it.

[gamerman4]

Originally posted by EXO Muffin
Yep, I didn't buy PS any time recently. My mom got it several years ago, and it costs a LOT OF MONEY for the new kinds, so she just stuck with that. I wish I had Illustrator.

And, 135 MB for a brush set?! Wow. My computer has only 4 GB total C drive capacity. New computers have, like, 40 GB. I'm really amazed. My computer sucks.

Yes, PS5 has actions. I don't know how most work, so, could you format some brushes into a simpler or more compatible format for me?

Hehe....I build computers....new computers come with around ~100-200GB. My comp has 330GB (80GB Hard drive and a 250GB one soon to buy another 200GB)
You really could use an upgrade. Also, converting brushes would prolly be a bit slow on your comp just seeing as how low your HDD capacity is, i doubt you entire comp is much better.

Also, i can't convert my brushes to PS5 since i dont actually have PS5.
Just download ABR viewer and download whatever brushes you want. Load the brushes into ABR Viewer and export them as PNGs. Then record an action where you just select the whole image, convert to brush, and close it. Photoshop has a batch processing mode that you can just put all the PNGs in one folder and it will convert them all by itself with that action you did.
If you use any IM program just gimme ur ID and I can walk you through it. (I use AIM, Yahoo, and MSN)

ABRViewer....http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/

[EXO Muffin]

200 GB?! That's insane! Also, I tried to use the ABRviewer, but it says it's missing a file. Maybe because I didn't get the RAR file with it?

[gamerman4]

Hmm...do you use any IM prog? I could help you out better if we could chat.

[EXO Muffin]

Hmm, here's what I came up with when I got a look at this.
Here are snapshots of mine:

1-


2-


3A-


3B-(when I did what you told me)



The original 3 looks better in my opinion.

SIGNATURIFIED!

[I Have a Sandwich]

Are you sure you did what he told you?

[EXO Muffin]

Yeah, but I didn't use a fractal BRUSH. I used a fractal PATH.

EDIT: Oh, wait. I forgot to change the blend modes.

[gamerman4]

....Okay

1. Fractals should start out as a bright white rtaher than dark colors. You add colors later. For that I would just desaturate it and do an auto contrast to maximize brightness.

2. That is a sad excuse for a fractal. ok...There are fractal paths and then there true fractals. Fractal paths have no gradient to them, they are one continuous color and they dont have bright or dark places. True fractals use complex calculations and use a gradient for variations. This makes them look pretty. Even though it was sad, here is what I did to it after making the proper white color.

Also, I attached a working version of ABR Viewer, it shouldnt give any errors. Download this and go download some real fractals from deviantart. Or if your computer can handle it, you can try your hand at rendering your own fractals with Apophysis (Google it).


Signaturified....

[EXO Muffin]

It gives me an error when I press,"Add." It says a directory extension was not specified. Could you make a WinZip Wizard version of the file? RARs seem to not work on my computer.

I got Apophysis and it's awesome. So awesome I don't even use it for brushes, but whole pictures right now. Thanks for telling me about it!