Well hey guys. I see many of you looking for a banner for your forums. So yeah, I thought of showing it to you how simple it is to make one. Instead, you should be able to get a similar outcome even if you have no photoshop skill (tutorial is fresh install friendly).
Outcome:
(Sorry nev :p)
Most skins come with a default logo, if not you could just use the PrtSc button and use the crop tool (press "C") to crop the banner now. Here is what my skin gave me:
Now that we have done that, the hard part starts.
You need to look for Rectangular Marquee Tool(Shortcut "M"). It's the one that looks like a dotted square thing. Once you found that right click it and select single column marquee tool.
This is the one:
Once you select that tool, just click anywhere on the canvas (where there is just the background not with the text). Here is where I clicked:
Now press ctrl+c (to copy) and press ctrl+n (new canvas). You should see something like this now:
The width has to be 1 and the height depends on your banner. Now change the width to your original banner size. Mine was 850px so I changed mine:
Alright so now just paste your selection (ctrl+v) onto the canvas.
Now we need to strech this to fit the whole canvas. To do so, we would use free transform (ctrl+t). Once your press ctrl+t, a bounding box would disappear and you just drag it to the left and to the right till it fits the canvas.
Then just press "Enter" to save the transformation.
Ok so the now we have got a clean background with no text on it. You could directly add your typeface here or add some pattern to it. In my banner, I added a simple metal background which can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/KoRFK.jpg
I just dragged the wallpaper into my banner canvas and changed the blending mode to color dodge.
I felt the pattern was too strong so I used the eraser tool (http://picstash.com/images/UkBnA.png) and erased around the edges till I got something like this:
Alright finally, let's move on to text. Remember to choose a good font. If you can't find any good font, you could just use the common ones they always work such as Century Gothic, Helvetica, Myraid Pro and Roboto.
So I added my text with two colors, blue and white:
Just right click the text layer and click on blending options. We're gonna be adding a gradient overlay as well as a stroke.
Gradient Overlay: http://picstash.com/images/0TemB.png
You could follow the same settings but I suggest you, you change the blue gradient to the gradient you want your logo to be in.
Stroke: http://www.picstash.com/images/32xCl.png
Change the size according to your logo.
That's it just click ok and you would get something like this:
I added the blink for some extra effect, you could try experimenting out and see what's nice
Hope you guys enjoyed the tutorial.
