Current mood:	devious
Current music:	Jason Mraz//Geek in Pink
Entry tags:	tutorial

From this to



NOTE: I am using Paint Shop Pro version 8. This tutorial is easily transferable.

ALSO. When dealing with curves in this tut, they should NOT look like this. They SHOULD look like this.

1. Cropped and resized this cap from BSG Caps to get my base: . I did this by Image>>Resize, and resized using percent instead of pixels.

2. Decided the base was too blurry and dull to start with, so did Layers>>New Adjustment Layer>>Curves to clear out the greenish-gray blurryness and "sharpen" the image.

The curves layer settings:

RGB:
Input- 76
Output- 117

Red:
input- 139
output- 145

Green:
input- 105
output- 120

blue:
in- 135
out- 213

Then I set the curves layer to softlight.

3. Then I sharpened the base, but on a low opacity, about 40%. It doesn't have to be on 100% to sharpen.

At this point, the merged copy looked like this:



4. Layers>>New Raster Layer. Flood Fill with #0B2133 (navy-ish blue) set to Exclusion 100%. Duplicate.

You should have something like this:

5. Layers>>New Raster Layer. Flood fill with #F5C7C5 (pinkish) set to Multiply 100%.

6. Layer>>New Raster Layer. Flood fill with #C1E0F5 (light bluish) set to Burn 100%.

7. Layers>>New Adjustment Layer>>Curves.

Settings:

RGB:
Input- 123
Output- 167

Red:
input- 183
output- 200

Green:
input- 70
output- 89

blue:
in- 94
out- 85

Set to Normal 100%.

8. Layers>>New Adjustment layer>>Brightness/Contrast. Set Brightness to -20 and Contrast to 40. Set layer to soft light 100%.

9. Layers>>New Raster Layer. Flood fill with black and set to Color(L) 34%.

10. Now, duplicate the very bottom layer. Selecting this layer, go into Adjust>>Blur>>Gaussian Blur at 2.0. Set this layer to screen, place it inbetween the Curves and Brightness/Contrast layers, and set it to 32% opacity.

11. Open new vector layers and enter any text you want. Should look like this:



12. Merge the whole document other than the text. Then open it in a new image.

13. With the new image, create a black flood-fill layer and set to Color(L) 100%. Crop out a portion of this (mine's about 30px) and merge the document. Copy onto the original (with the text).

14. In a new raster layer, above the BW Helo part, create a rectangle with the selection tool and flood fill the rectangle with white.



And you're done. Tell me what you think or if you have any problems. :)