New Avatar and Sig. Opinions please?

[flakmagnet]

Hi guys. Threw myself together a new avatar and sig with some of the stickered sackboys I'd make, got myelf some pictures taken just before the beta ended. Opinions? Better or worse than my old ones?

[TheArmedReaper]

Do you use photoshop?..

[flakmagnet]

'lil bit yeah. I wanted two on the same screen and there was only one of me at the time, so I copy/pasted the pic to a background I nabbed from an official screenshot. I also used 'shop for the text. Sadly I have no idea how to do the badass backgrounds like yours and code's for example, so mine always get pasted onto an existing background, or a gradient like my last one!

It also takes me ages to remove sackboy from his original background, that's why little more happens after he's been put on a new one, I kind of lose patience!

[TheArmedReaper]

Lol. It's nice.
I wish I could do those badass backgrounds aswell. A mate gave this one to me in exchange for a beta code. It was awesome.
Like you said, I also get impaitent. I bet, if I was paitent, I could produce one, but meh!

[Ozymandias]

I don't know how to do those cool backgrounds so I just settle with random brushes and the color balance thingy.



This one, however, is probably the coolest sig I made. I lost the PSD to it so I couldn't fix the text X_X oh well.

Anyways, this topic is about -your- signature... The yellowish Sackboy reminds me of the sun while the cyan one reminds me of the ocean =P It seems that the compression on the image kills the text though, very ugly compression X_X

[flakmagnet]

Hmm. It looked bigger on my 40" at home. I was on a 19" at work and did think it didn't look as good. Shall see if I still have the shotoshop .psd to edit the text, make it clearer.

[ScytheOfGrim]

Saving the file as a .PNG instead of .JPEG should smoothen the image out.

But if you want me to give you my honest opinion about your signature... well... uhh... should I try being nice? ~_^

Well... it's too screenshot-ish...
Doesn't look like a proper sig.

Some of the backgrounds you see in people's sigs are made using vector images, which is why many look cartoon-like.
You can make cool backgrounds using different layers and filters, but you'll need to have some serious understanding of all the filters and tools...

Just play around with it.
Duplicate the existing layers and then change their blending style, or add a filter, or desaturate it and then add a filter for different effects...

How much of that did you get? xD

[flakmagnet]

I got most of it. I know how to use most of the filters to get something particular, I just can never get it to only affect the background and not the character (take Reaper's for example) without a stipdly lengthy selection process, and I didn't have the patience for it! If there is a quick, effective way to get rid of that problem, I'm all over messing around with the filters and blending.

Thanks for the advice. If there is a decent way to deal with my problem, please let me know and I'll be looking at making a new sig sooner!

Thanks for the advice. I'll save it as a png next time. I usually just save in jpg as a default. No idea why...