Guide to making a Stylish Avatar

[Guest bigdady]

OK this tutorial was not made by me and i poste it here becouse a lot of people dont know how to make Avatar including me :P and becouse this guy made some hot Avatar

hello and welcome to my new guide, here you will learn how to make that stylish avatar you always dreamed of making.
This tutorial requires

• Photoshop
• The most basic photoshop knowledge

The final result is going to look like this:



So lets jump right in, first things first, launch adobe photoshop.*
once its open, the first thing we want to do is create a new project
on the top menu click File > New

A windows should pop up input the following settings and press ok.

• ( for the purpose of this tutorial, i will be using adobe photoshop cs4 but these techniques can be replicated in most recent versions)

Now we have our blank image we should get started. the first thing we want to be looking for is Background image. Find a suitable background at officialpsds.com. I chose to use this sepia background:



Right click on the image you choose and press copy image.
go back to photoshop and press edit > paste now we have our background, however it is to big for photoshop, have no fear! resize is here (:

Press ctrl+T on your keyboard with the layer of the background image selected, drag the corners of the image while holding down shift to protect aspect ratio. once the image is resized, move it around till you like how your background looks.

So far, this is how our project looks:



Next thing we want to do, is find a render to place on top of the image. A render is essentially a image cut out from its background, saved in a psd on a transparent background.

Find your render here: Newest PSDs | Official PSDs

I'm going to use this psd whatever psd you choose, click the download PSD button:



once you've downloaded the rar file, extract the psd from inside and open it in photoshop. you should see something like this:



Press ctrl+a to select your image, then press ctrl+c to copy it. move back to your original project and press ctrl+v. select the Girls image layer press ctrl+t like before and resize it to fit your avatar background.

you should now have something like this:



Now as you can see, the image and background aren't blending so marvelously, so were gonna need to work some magic first.
press the adjustment layer buttonand select levels. make sure the levels layer is above all the rest.

Your levels settings should look like this:



Set the levels opactiy to 68%

and your layers like this:



now randomly add some color balance layers form the adjustment layer menu

These are the ones I added, but you can do your own:







Now your avatar should be looking something like this:



Not too shabby! the background layer and the foreground image have pretty much blended together color and lighting wise.

Next thing we want to be doing is text.
Select the text buttonand create a new text box. in it type your nickname, for the purpose of this tutorial, I am going to use mine.

once you have finished select your text layer,
and press the fx button

These are the effects i used, however you can modify them to your liking:





The font I used was Deftone Stylus

so far this is how it looks:



Now were just going to make a circular frame and were done.
select the rounded rectangle tool, by clicking U. and make a rounded rectangle on top of your image. should look like this:



Now hold down control, and click on the rectangles layer, this should make a selection around it, now delete the rectangle but keep the selection. once the rectangle is gone and you just have the rounded selection press select > inverse and with that selection proceed to go over the girl layer and the BG layer and press delete.

You should now have this:



now fill the white background with forum color which is: #1f1f1f

now for the final result:



Pretty snazzy huh

Here's another one I made to demonstrate Flexibility

[Guest seedking]

I suck at photoshop but i might give this a try