*GFX pet peeves

[WildfireMicro]

Hey and guys and gals and everything in between WildfireMicro here to talk about some things about doing GFX that make me want to bash my head against the wall, and maybe give some tips to help you fix these problems. This will be in no particular order and I am not aiming for any particular word count, it will mostly be me just complaining. So without any further ado, let's begin! 

Logo removal:

 I will use Jared Lorenzen here as an example. Let's say I want to remove the Kentucky logo here to replace it with, say, one of the logos in the DSFL. We'll an easy solution in Gimp is installing an add-on called Resynthesizer and selecting around the logo with Free Select to use Heal selection to get rid if it. I do not know how it works, but it does.


You see the logo is now gone. But the helmet does not look quite right, does it? Ignore the fact that I already did a color swap, just focus on the helmet. I'll go over color swaps in a bit. Luckily, I can cover this mistake with a bit of the clone tool and just covering it up with the logo.


See? Looks way better huh. By the way I am doing these swaps just to see how my player Trevor Lorenzen would look in these colors. But then we get to the more frustrating kinds of logos to remove, the sideways logos. And that will bring us to this segment:

Front facing helmets:

I will just say this, and major apologies to Sebester: this is one of my least favorite sigs I had to work on. It just wouldn't end up looking the way I really wanted it to look, and part of that is the front facing helmet. Not only will the removal of logos always look like crap thanks to how Heal selection works (please let me know if there is a better way to do that), but putting the team logo on... look if you can find a way to make it look legit on front facing helmets let me know. It can just be extended frustrating and I wish I knew a really good way to do it. But hey, I'm learning photoshop so maybe that will help eventually..?

Color swaps:
These can be ether extremely easy or extremely frustrating depending on the render in question. If the render has only on real shade of a color it's easy! Those are usually anime and cartoon renders though. However, multiple different shades make it really hard for the Gimp Color selection tool to not just grav one shade of the color, forcing me to have to colorize every individual shade. Thankfully, hue sliders in Photoshop can make this a bit easier. But since I didn't figure out they existed until yesterday, I just had to suffer for a while. Luckily we have only one more thing I can complain about, and it is mostly obsolete now thanks to my new tools:

Removing backgrounds:
If you do not truly know what you are doing, removing backgrounds to turn a jpg of a player or render into a png can be a pain. But let me give you a few tips to help:
. Use the site that let's you remove backgrounds of images first. This also has the benefit of turning a jpg into a png for you. Google it, then bookmark it.
. Fuzzy Select in Gimp is a godsend. It can Select certain parts of a image so you can remove them. This also helps with color swapping
. If you are not using the remove background site to do it, ALWAYS remember to add an Alpha Channel to the layer. This will help turn it into a png and will make the background not reappear when you work on it again.

Well I guess that is all I can complain about right now. There is one more thing I will say: REMEMBER TO EXPORT YOUR IMAGE, NOT SAVE IT! Saving your image in Gimp will just save it in a file format that other programs won't recognize as images. Save As does work in Photoshop, just remember to change file format. Using Overwrite an image also helps, though exporting will let you save it into any file format you want while overwriting will just save it in the same format you had it in to begin with. If it sounds complicated, it's really not. You'll get used to it.

Anyways, thank you for reading and I hope to see you all on the field and making something nice!

[ThunderTitan82]

An easy one to take care of, removing backgrounds. Just go to Adobe spark on the web and you can use the background remover they have for free, download a new png, takes care of cutting everything out

[TeyonSchavari]

For me personally, I just cut out my image by free selecting the render, then inverting the selection and just deleting the background. Takes longer but you can be as precise as you want with it. Using a background removal tool in another app first usually works just as well, I just like the freedom of being able to cut out or leave some things in from time to time.

For color swaps I also just use the free select tool to pick out the sections I want to colorize. Utilizing the + select and - select options on the tool are a great help; using the addition part to just keep adding more parts that I want to colorize, and the subtract part if I want to select the whole jersey first then cut out the numbers for example. It can be a pain and there are probably betters ways but I found it to be much more reliable than using fuzzy select or color select which can leave some 'residue' of the old color very easily and make it tough to fix without having to redo it.

I haven't heard of the resynthesizer add-on - I'll have to look into that. Would be a nice time saver.

For logos on front facing helmets, I use the transform tool on GIMP. I just mess with it a bunch until it looks like it is facing forward and put it where it looks like it should go on the helmet. It usually hangs off the back of the helmet which obviously you don't want. So, I hide the logo layer and use the select tool to select the helmet. Then I invert the selection and go back to the logo layer. From there I just use the eraser and erase everything as the selection stops you from deleting the part that is on the helmet. After that it looks fairly natural. Here's an example in one of my gfx of a couple forward facing logos on helmets: 





A couple other tips I have for blending logos on helmets: First, depending on how you size and position the logo, make sure you make an extra layer where you copy and paste a free selection of the strap and sometimes the facemask to layer on top of the logo so the logo looks more like it is actually on the helmet. Second, use the blur tool on the edges of the logo a little bit to help it blend into the helmet, and use the Dodge/Burn tool to help it blend with the lighting - dodge tool on the spots where it looks like the light is hitting the helmet, and the burn tool on the darker parts. That will further help it look completely natural on the helmet.

Hope this will help you!