Finished the new look…well to be fair it was not much, only new Banner and About page, but every little counts…

Recently I have started to play with Photoshop, I am still a beginner, but its just so fun !

Took me a while to make the banner in Photoshop CS3. Here is a summery of what I did:

So first I got the photo of the computer and piece of smashed glass. I then cut out the background of the computer monitor using the pen tool, I did the same to remove the monitors original screen. With the broken glass, I had resize and Skew the image to get the correct perspective (Edit>Transform>Skew)

You can see a half deformed sledge hammer in this screenshot because I found a photo of a sledgehammer, but it didn’t fit the photo so I had to find a new one, I simply erased the handle and placed the new sledgehammer above it. (YES I know you thinking.’why didn’t you just delete the layer?’ well..I had already merged the two layers of the sledge hammer and computer monitor smart-arse)

ANYWAY – The next step is to add in the pile of keyboard keys. I found a photo of a blank key and simply added some text onto it in the appropriate colour and size. I rotated the keys slightly so that it looked messy, and finally added a Gaussian Blur, which gives the impression the keys are in the distance (and to allow the Disgruntalism keys to stand out more)

In the above screenshot you can see around the hammer I added some shadow with the Burn tool, making it fit in with computer (kind of).

Next part is to add the Disgruntalism text, I used the same keyboard keys as I used previously with the background, just slightly bigger, I had to resize them slightly so that the 13 letter word would fit into the banner. The tiny border you can see in the finished banner at the top of the page was created whilst following

The tiny border you can see in the finished banner at the top of the page was created whilst following a tutorial here: http://www.easyelements.com/jagged-border.html

Cant really call this a tutorial as such, but I just wanted to walkthrough how I made the banner.

P.S – I almost had a panic attack thinking I had spelt Disgruntalism wrong…