Header Tutorial

We'll be making this (click to enlarge, duh):





Made in PSP 8 but is easily translated (in fact it probably works better in PS)

I'm not going to go into EVERY little detail because I don't want a million and one clones of my work ;)

01: Make a new canvas 500x300. I tend to have mine with a transparent background but it really doesn't matter. Paste a sky texture onto your canvas and leave it at normal, 100% opacity. This is going to be your starting point. I used one by peoplemachines who I absolutely love.

02: Paste a black 'smog' or 'scratched' texture on top of your canvas, on a new layer. I used another one by peoplemachines but there are other ones out there. Set this layer as screen, 100%

03: Add more textures, because well with this kinda thing you want to pile on the textures, just don't do it stupidly. Light textures work quite well, I've found. I used two by tre set to screen. (Yes I'm being vague, I want you to come up with something slightly different from mine! Which is also why I'm not posting pics in case you can't be bothered with the textures and just steal mine ;))

04: Now for a bit of color. I used curves which I got from 3am_icons which you can find here: it's number 8 It's still not looking quite right, so I found another smog texture from (you guessed it) peoplemachines and pasted it on top. I set it at multiply (because the bits I want to show up are black) at 90% and then erased some bits I wasn't happy with.

05: I decided my background/base was looking pretty damn hawt, so it was time to add some more hawtness in the shape of House/Cam ;) I found some screencaps of Sports Medicine (cutest ep ever, quite possibly) from damaged and pasted this one (which I have used and abused over the past couple years lol) as a new image on PSP. I'm not sure exactly what I did to it, but I definitely desaturated it ;) Then I pasted it as a new layer on the base (what we've just been doing for the last 5 mins) and positioned it accordingly.

06: I wasn't very happy with it's blunt edges, and I'm not one for erasing so I found some pretty mask brushes by latexandleather (someone else who ROCKS) and played around on a new layer until I got this (a mixture of like 3 brushes and a whole lot of erasing):



Then I dragged this layer to underneath the House/Cam pic and positioned it.

07: Time for more pictures. I pasted another screencap from the same source onto PSP as a new image and resized it to like 30%. I also screened it a couple times because it's from that scene which is SO dark it's practically impossible to use the caps without a million screen layers ;) I think I put a softlight layer on top too ;) Then I copied it (Copy Merged) and pasted it onto the rest of what I'd done. I kinda wanted it to look a little more interesting, so I rotated it 90% and put it down the side of the other H/C cap.

08: I did the exact same thing as 07 all over again to another picture, but didn't rotate it. This one I stuck over the corner of the first screencap so that it drew away from that huge white space above Cameron's head.

09: Add some random brushes (I added some sticky tape cross thinga and a random text brush. Not sure who made the tape thing but text by dearest) and text. YOU'RE DONE!

Hopefully this helped SOMEONE lmao. I've decided I'm not gonna bother with loads of pictures and whatnot since I don't want a billion and one things looking exactly like mine. I know I didn't come up with this concept, I'm not an idiot, but still ;) If you do want some help finding textures, let me know and I'll see what I can do.