Character Banner Tutorial
Screen caps: Leave Me in the White: Caps
Gradient: 77words [download]
Texture: iconistas [download]
1. Open your base image
2. Crop the image to the size you want.
3. Use auto contrast to lighten the image. (Image --> Adjustments --> Auto Contrast)
4. Duplicate the background and set the background copy to Soft Light.
5. Okay now we start on the first image of the fade. So you open your second image, crop it to the size you want, and again we use auto contrast to lighten it.
6. Copy and paste the image on top of the base image. And set that layer to Soft Light. Then play with the layer alignment until the image is where you want it to be.
7. Now to add a soft glow around River's face from the first image, take the eraser (100 px, Opacity 100%, Flow 100%) and erase on the second image's layer around her face and hair.
8. Now for the third image, open it, crop it to the size you want, and again we use auto contrast to lighten it.
9. Copy and paste it on to the base image. Now to make it work better with the other two images, I flipped the image horizontally (Edit --> Transform --> Flip Horizontally) and then Rotated it to the left (Edit --> Transform --> Rotate 90° CCW), then i aligned the image to where i wanted it to be and set the layer to Linear Light.
10. Because there is all that extra dark gunk now from the third image, I took my eraser (100 px, Opacity 100%, Flow 100%) and erased mostly every thing but her head and part of her dress.
11. Now you have your basic image. Next we open the large image from iconistas's firefly spin, and crop it to the size we want.
12. Copy and paste that on to the fade and set the layer to screen.
13. Next I flipped the texture vertically (Edit --> Transform --> Flip Vertically) since some of it over powers the pictures.
14. There is one problem with the texture, it has these huge lines and the actual dots seem a bit too in focus. So I used guassian blur ( Filter --> Guassian Blur) set on 2.7 pixels. Then I deleted the part of the texture that covered the boarder using the Rectangular Marquee and selecting everything but boarder then inversing the selection (Select --> Inverse).
15. Add the gradient and text, and you are finished!