Industrial Blend

Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop (optional)
3 to 4 images of choice mine are by Miss Omega and I am using them with written permission.
Font(s) of choice, mine are GC Channel F Standard for the credits,
and Xerox Malfunction (BRK) for the name
dsb flux or also here is optional

Open all your images and resize them if necessary, just make sure they are all the same height.
All mine are 400x600 for now, we'll be resizing later, so no need to worry about a mahoosive tag. I had to crop some of mine slighly after that because they have the website printed on one side.
Just use the crop tool for that; click on snap crop rectangle to merged opaque and then grab one of the edge nodes in the middle with your cursor and pull it towards the middle until what you want to get rid of is in the darker part, then hit the tick to apply.
Now if I wanted all pics next to each other I'd need a new canvas 1600px wide, I'm gonna go for half that and the height of my images. So I opened a new canvas 800x600, made it transparent and set the resolution to 72.000ppi.
All four of my images have a resolution way above that, but to be compliant with most tou's we must keep our creations at 72.000ppi.
Now copy and paste all the images onto your new canvas and arrange to your liking, maybe they can tell a story. To change the stacking order you can highlight a layer in your layer palette and drag it up or down.
Don't worry if your images obscure each other, the canvas is too small, that is why now we need to get rid of some parts of the pics. Also don't worry if the pictures don't totally line up anymore after you arranged them, that will all be dealt with, so long as the difference isn't too great.
Take your freehand selection tool (the lasso) and set it to point to point, add shift, feather and smoothing 0, antialias ticked.
Now take the toplayer image and go around the main focus on it with your lasso, you need to click every time you have a change in direction.
Stay away from the person/ flowers/ whatever as we'll be feathering the selection, you don't want too much of the main focus to disappear. Also, stay to the sides only, you can't blend the top and bottom with anything.

Selections, modify/feather, a little dialog window pops up, click on both of the eye buttons, then you will see what the feathering will select on your actual tag.
Mine is at 19 for this, you need to play around to find what suits your image best.

Press okay and hit delete on your keyboard several times.
You want a soft look, don't worry if you see canvas behind the 'hole', just arrange the pic underneath so it will fill the hole or maybe move pictures and layers about again.
Select the next image that is at the top and feather it, you may decide to rearrange your layers again, and shift them here or there. I usually leave the outside edges alone. The look you want to achieve is that all the images are on one layer. For this example I didn't even need to feather the lower images.

You should have a bottom layer that is still transparent. You can floodfill it with any colour of your choice, even with a patterend or textured fill.
As we won't merge til later on it doesn't matter too much right now, cos you can change your mind. I filled mine with the blue on the stones.
Make the top layer active and add a new raster layer. Floodfill with a textured dark colour, I used black.
In your color palette pick your colour, then tick the texture option and click the wee arrow next to the picture, choose a texture from the browser, after some trials I opted for grass 02.
Now add another layer and fill with a solid colour of choice, I used her lip colour.
Go to effects and choose texture effects/tiles with these settings, or play around. Now we get to the proper blending.
Open your layer palette, make it stick open with the lil pin, click on that so it points down. On the right you see the word normal next to every layer, that is where you change the blend modes.
If your palette is too small to see the words properly, put your cursor on the edge of the palette and drag it to the right when you see a double arrow. Same if you need to go longer.
The layers do not need to be active to change a blend mode, bear in mind that changing the blend mode of a layer will affect the look of the ones above it. Now you can go crazy with picking blend modes for all your layers.
The only one you cannot change is the bottom one, it has nothing to blend with, but you can change the colour or even make it textured.
This is what my layer palette looked like in the end, I have also changed the opacity in some instances, you need to see what suits your images most. I was looking for an industrial look.

When you're done doing your blending, collapse the layer palette by clicking on the pin again. It rolls open when you hold your mouse on it. Neat, huh?
Now....are you happy with what you created? Really happy, you don't want to fiddle here or there, change that blendmode and this opacity?
100% sure? Okay, then merge all visible. Eek, it's done now, if you changed your mind, go back and change stuff, next time you're really really sure, merge visible.
If your bottom and top edges are uneven, go and crop now, same tactics as we did before. Mine is still 800x587 though.... resize by 80%

Sharpen/ unsharp mask with these settings: Radius 6, Strength 11, Clipping 2, Luminance only checked.
Resize 80% again, mine is 512x376 now, that's plenty big enough for me as a tag. You may have to sharpen again.
The example here is a bit bigger, I didn't resize twice, cos I don't like iddby biddy examples lol. Now its time to think about the edges, I don't like 'em all straight and I don't want add a border.
Add a new raster layer and send it to the bottom. Floodfill with white or any colour of your preference. Highlight the merged layer in your palette.
Take your lasso tool, only change the feather to 4, start about 1/2 inch from the edge and click randomly until you have a jagged line going all the way round and double click to connect to the start.

Selections/invert and press delete on your keyboard for a couple of times.
Resize that layer to 96%, all settings like above, just untick 'resize all layers'. Add a coloured dropshadow on a new layer

Go back to the merged layer and add another dropshadow, going the other way (take the minus' away), also on a new layer. x out the merged and the bottom layers and merge visible the two shadow layers. Make all layers visible again.
Make the top layer active. If you need to resize all layers again please do so now, as we'll be adding the credits.
Choose a small font, pixelfonts are best in my opinion, those need to be used with antialias off!! Choose a colour that compliments the tag, but make sure the credits are legible. I'm using my font at size 6 (you need to type it in).
Create as vector, that allows you to easily rotate your credits by 90 degrees. I want mine down the side, so once I applied the text tool, I have the vecor frame around it, and go to image/ rotate, free rotate, right, 90, all boxes unticked.
You'll see a pokey thing sticking out now, take that as a lead and find the center of the vector with your cursor, when it changes to the 4 way arrow, left click it to grab it and move it to where you want it.
Let go and see if it's centered, if not go to Objects/align, vertical center in canvas. Convert to raster layer.
You may want to change the opacity, but don't go too low.

It's time to add your name. Create as vector, antialias set to sharp, make the font size bigger and take about 20 mins to look for the font you like best.
I used Xerox Malfunction BRK, with white as the stroke, width 2 and the same colour for the fill as I used for the credits.
Size 72 was too wide, 48 too small, so I typed in 60 and applied, I used the top middle horizontal node node to strectch my words taller.
Then I centered the words with Objects/align, horizontal center in canvas.
Then I held down the Ctrl key to pull the top right node to the right to make the words wider at the top, I also pushed the bottom right node in a bit while holding down the Ctrl key. Convert to raster layer, add a dropshadow on the same layer.

I changed the blend mode to luminance and duplicated that layer, to the original layer I added an inner bevel (set the settings (colour was #efa25a), then save the bevel, give it a name or number.

Then I moved my bottom words layer slightly higher.
Remember your results will look totally different from mine, I wanted to show you how you can make a blend, what tools you can use to make it yours ;o) If you want to keep it as a template, name it and save as a psp image, hit shift D to copy it. Carry on on the original, minimise the copy for now.
Click on image/image information, choose the tab 'creator information'.
Type in the font name, the colour no's (in the colour palette the no after HTML:) and settings, dropshadow (you can save the settings for that too btw, you can go back and do it now) the blend mode, even though you can see that in the palette. the duplication, move layer and bevel name. And you can later add stuff like what noise settings you used and what speed you animated at. OK that and save as pspimage.

Now go back to the copy you made, save it as a jpg now or animate it.
You can add noise with an outside filter or PSPs noise.I'll show you both ways.
PSP noise first
Make active the shadow layer. Go to adjust/ add/remove noise/add noise. Choose uniform,check monochrome and go for 12%.
Right click on the tag and choose copy merged. Open animation shop and right click on the background and paste as new animation.
Back in PSP, click undo once and add noise with 14%, right click, copy merged, go to AS, right click on your first frame and paste after current frame.
And do all that again with percentage set to 16%. You now have 3 frames. Click the little movie icon in your toolbar, the last but one.
The animation is very subtle ;o) You can make it more pronounced by setting the percentages higher. I like it to be seen at 2nd glance.
Save as a gif.
With a filter called dsb flux you have more settings choices with making the noise darker and lighter.
The way you do it is the same, you just apply a different filter. The one you want is called bright noise, darker means that you get more dark pixels, lighter means the opposite and mix is a mix of the two obviously.
You have to see which suits your tag best, but stay with either darker, mix or lighter, do not mix them in the layers. Set an intensity and then for each new frame you click the word of the chosen hue just once to change the random seed.
I don't know who started the nonsense with once, twice, then thrice, and was then copied into tuts everywhere lol.... well it's unnecessary.
I used 26 and mix, so okay it, copy merged into AS, etc, same as above. Don't forget to undo though. ;o) Save as a gif.
Now you can add those settings to the image information of the original tag and if someone asks you for one in a few months time you can look up the settings and replicate your tag ;o)

This tutorial was created April 04, 2008 and is the sole property of ooh...babelicious. Similarity to other tutorials is purely coincidental. Do not copy this or any of my tutorials, or any part of my tutorials, to another site unless you have express permission from me to do so. If you want to share, send the URL, do not direct link or offer on your site. Give credit where credit is due. Do not script this tutorial and offer to others.