How To: Transparent Banners for Beginners

Making a transparent banner is a lot easier than it might look. I remember when I didn't know how, and then I slap myself. It's easy peasy.

Step one. Click File>New. Do this thing.
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Now, you have this.
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This is your transparency. Any time you have these grey and black checks, the part that is checked will be transparent.

So, Add your text. Or whatever.
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But this is boring. There are many things you can do to tweak it; I'll show shadowing and layering an image with it.

Go here for drop shadows.
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A box will pop up, just click okay, really. I usually repeat the drop shadow with ctrl+F, which is the shortcut to repeat the filter you used most recently.

Here it is shadowed.
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But it's still pretty boring, though not as much as before.

So, I make a new layer underneath everything else.
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Here, I'll put an image.

I just dropped on a stamp on that new layer.
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So, yeah, it's ugly, but those are the basics! Keep experimenting and come up with something awesome!

Also, when saving your image, make sure to save it as .png to preserve the transparency! Otherwise, the clear will turn white.


As always, if you have questions, let me know in the comments!

Awesome! Thanks so much! <3 I can't wait to try! :puggy:

so in gimp do you not need to save it as a png file to keep transparency?

Yes! You do! LOL I was going to add that, but forgot. THANKS!

Vanadis wrote:Yes! You do! LOL I was going to add that, but forgot. THANKS!

I was wondering...lol

Thought maybe I missed something ::

JadedCat1983 wrote:

Vanadis wrote:Yes! You do! LOL I was going to add that, but forgot. THANKS!

I was wondering...lol

Thought maybe I missed something ::

lol nah, I was just being my normal scatterbrained self.

THANK YOU!!!!

Thanks so much for this!! It really helped

You're very welcome!

I got the tramsparent part but it's the text effect I can't seem to get right. I want it slim and shiny but the chrome effect ive tried isnt what I want.

Are you using Gimp or Photoshop?

Gimp, I tried photoshop but really didn't get it

There's this one effect you can do called Xach effect (Under filters > light and shadow) Not sure if that's what you want, but it does shiny things up a bit. I find photoshop is better for editing text than Gimp unfortunately... :/

I tried that but it wasn't enough, I mean if there was a tut for text in photoshop I might be able to figure it out, I always find photoshop to be harder go me to figure out

I'm not really an expert at text... I think there are some text tuts here

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Maybe one of those will help?

Thanks, but I think I got what I want now if I can just get it to stay transparent when I put it on my phone

Have to save it as a .png

Thanks guys I got it all worked out now!

Woot!

I don't normally use GIMP or Photoshop for banners, I use a totally different program for that
but nice tutorial