(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Signatures beginners guide.

If you are new to creating signatures this is the tutorial to start with when you have zero knowledge!

In this tutorial u will learn the following:

What brushes are, where to get them and how to use them.
How to add color to your background.
Where to get renders, what renders are and how to use them.
How to blend your render with the background.
How to create focus and a feeling of depth in your signature.
How to add text and a border.

Sound good lets start. This is an idea of what we will be making.

You must login or register to view this content.

Creating the background.

First create a new document, for the canvas size I choose 380 X 140. Make sure you have the colors black and white set as your foreground and background color (Hit the D key if this isn’t the case), then go to Filter>render>clouds to create your first layer.

You must login or register to view this content.

Brushes

To use the brushes i used in this tutorial link is: You must login or register to view this content. Once downloaded to your computer you will need to add the brushes file into: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Your photoshop version\Presets\Brushes,
now you might need to restart photoshop to load them.

Select the Brush Tool (B), now load your downloaded brush by doing the following:

You must login or register to view this content.

Make a new layer (CTRL+SHIFT+N) and with black as your color selected simply click on your canvas to brush, don’t overdo it just a few times is fine.

You must login or register to view this content.

Select a different brush from your brush pack and switch your foreground color to white, now create a new layer again and brush a bit on this layer.

You must login or register to view this content.

After a few layers of using a brush pack you can switch around to a different brush pack, to keep your signature interesting. Every time switching from a black to white when changing brushes.

You must login or register to view this content.

You must login or register to view this content.

The background is now finished, time to add some color onto our background!

Adjusting Contrast

You can open the brightness and contrast adjustment screen by going to Layer > New adjustment layer > brightness and constrast on the top of your screen, you can also use the shortcut icon that is located on the bottom of your layers panel.

You must login or register to view this content.

You must login or register to view this content.

Adjusting the contrast in your signature can improve the background a lot:

BEFORE:
You must login or register to view this content.

AFTER:
You must login or register to view this content.

Coloring the background

Coloring your background can be done in a lot of ways, this maybe not be the easiest and quickest technique, but it does give great colors matching your render.

What are Renders?

Renders are images that are cut out from the original image, this way you can use them in your signature without having to spend time cutting out the part you want (for example a game character) from its background, saving you lots of time!

Where do i get Renders?

You must login or register to view this content. is a great place to download renders. You can also download render packs from the web.

Once you have your render:

Opening your render

Renders are almost always saved as a .png with a transparent background, for best quality and low file size. When you simply copy and paste the render from your browser into photoshop, you will notice that the transparent background has been gone.
To prevent this you will first need to save your render on your computer, after that you can safely open it in photoshop. Right click > open with photoshop, then copy the render and go back to your original document, now you can paste in your render while the background remains transparent.

Add your render on a new layer inside your document, then duplicate it as many times as u like (right click on the layer > duplicate layer) and move layers so they fill the whole canvas like this:

You must login or register to view this content.

Now select layers at the same time using CTRL now right click on the layers > merge layers and go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur

You must login or register to view this content.

Set this layers blending mode to overlay and you are finished coloring your background!

You must login or register to view this content.

You must login or register to view this content.

Adding your render

Now its time to add in your render, scale it down and place it in the right spot.

First add your render into your document again, like described before. Now go to Edit > Transform > Scale and drag the handles to make your render smaller so it fits into your canvas.(Note: Hold SHIFT while scaling to keep the original ratio, else your render will look strange).

You must login or register to view this content.

Make sure the interesting parts on your render are in the middle and the background isn’t distracting, the main focus point in the signature now is your render.

Blending your render

Since you just pasted the render onto the background it often looks like the render just floats on the background.Thats why you need to blend your render with the background. In this signature its actually already looking decent because of the way we colored our background to match with the render, we could have gotten away by just skipping this step, but I will show you one of the easiest blending techniques. After all you are here to learn new things right, not just to recreate someone else's signature!

Select the Eraser Tool (E) and use the following settings:

You must login or register to view this content.

With the eraser tool selected go around your render erasing bits of the outline, so your render and background “flow” into each other nicely, here is an example to show you the difference:

BEFORE:
You must login or register to view this content.

AFTER:
You must login or register to view this content.

See how it makes your render look better? (its not a huge difference in this signature, but in some signatures it can drastically improve your signature!)

Focus, depth and lighting

Focus, depth, flow and lighting are the most important things that make a signature really good, but they are very hard to explain and master so thats why I will not go into detail about these, I will however quickly show you some of the basic techniques. Things that are farther away from you tend to be vague, while things that are closer to you have much more detail. This effect can be reproduced in signatures using the blurring of things in the background, and sharpening things in the front. Another huge factor is the light in your signature, you will need to make sure it is coming from the right direction by looking at the shadows on your render. Good lighting can really improve your signature and make your render stand out more.

Before we can begin with this step we will need to add everything on one layer, we will do this by first creating a new layer (ctrl+shift+n), now go to Image > Apply Image and click ok.

First we will take out our sharpen tool and sharpen your render to make it stand out more, you can use the following settings:

You must login or register to view this content.

Then select your blur tool and blur the sides using the same settings as used for the sharpen tool, your signature should now look like this:

You must login or register to view this content.

Now its time to use the Burn and Dodge Tools (O). Use the burn tool to make the sides darker and use the Dodge tool to make the render stand out more, you can again use the settings I used for the sharpen tool.

Adding text and a border

As you can see your signature is almost done. Of course you can add a million kind of cool effects to your signature to improve it, the signature we made is is nice, but nothing impressive compared to the things you can create with more advanced techniques! Still I hope you learned the basics of creating a signature using renders and brushes.

Add a border! As with everything in a signature this can be done in multiple ways, here we will use one of the easiest (and probably best looking) ways to create a border.

Create a new layer above all your other layers, and hit CTRL+A, this will select the complete canvas.

Now go to Edit > Stroke and use the following settings to create a border around your selected area.

You must login or register to view this content.

You must login or register to view this content.

Text is one of the hardest things in creating signatures, it often happens that you make a great signature but you have no idea what to do with the text. My advice would be to just keep your text as simple as possible for now, when you are starting out you just need to make sure that your text doesn’t ruin your signature and is placed in the correct place. The best spot to place your text is near your render, don’t make your text overlap the important parts in your render but also make sure that you don’t tuck your text away in a corner.

Now take out your Text Tool (T) and choose something like Arial or Verdana as your font (remember keep it simple, no fancy fonts it will often look bad!). Now type the text you want and make sure that you set the color to something that matches with the rest of your signature. I also added a second subtext, this is not necessary but somehow it will always make your text look much better!

You must login or register to view this content.

Here is the final signature:

You must login or register to view this content.

This is the end of the tutorial, I hope you understand the basics of creating signatures now. If you got any questions feel free to ask them below, if you want feedback on the signatures you created make sure to post them.

+Rep if helped

You must login or register to view this content.

pretty cool man =D thanks ill have to try it when i get home

Will try.

Thanks for this TuT =D

thanks for the tutorial