The first thing you need to do, obviously, is pick out an image for skinning. This is much harder than it initially appears. The images you can use for skinning basically break down into two categories - the resize-and-crop, and the add-a-background. And some images just won't work at all. Let's start with the completely unworkable ones, first. Take, for example, this image of Miroku.
It's a nice image. Would it work for a skin? Hell no. Half of his arm is cut off at the image border - you'd need to draw in that, and some of the beads, or else set up the skin so that most of it was non-functional. I don't recommend either option. Like most people I've occasionally insisted on making skins of images that really weren't conducive to it, but if you're just learning - no. Go for something easier - it's a complicated enough process without adding trouble. For examples of the two ways of setting up a skin, let's look at the two skins I've made of Rikku. The first, and simplest, way of setting up a skin is just to resize and crop. Not all images will work with that, at least not the way I make skins; I don't approve of non-functional equalizers, or of making skins where parts of the character are covered by parts of the skin. And of course I am the final authority! Yeah... but I am teaching my method. And I'm normally looking for an image where the character's on a background - nothing too busy, but not blank, either. They need room within the image, especially off to the left - this image of Lina is an example of what I'm talking about, while this one, of Gourry, is the reverse. I was able to make a skin of it, but it gave me far more trouble than Lina's did, because I don't like flipping art either. This image of Rei is another example of an image that lends itself well to skinning. And then there's this one, of Rikku.
The image is from one of the official FFX wallpapers, and it's perfect for skinning - there's a reason there are approximately five million skins of it on the web. (I would like to point out that I made mine ages ago, possibly before the game was released in Japan. People have griped at me for using that overused image - it wasn't overused then! Yes, I am defensive.) Setting it up to skin was a matter of resizing it, and then checking it against my skin template to see if the size was about right. When I decided it was - there's always some trial and error - I cropped it down to 275 x 232, setting it up to be the base for the main and equalizer windows for a skin. The other method involves a bit more work and editing. The example I'm using was fairly straightforward - I started with this image of Rikku.
As you can see, she's on a blank, light gray background. I started out just by selecting the background with the magic wand tool, then adding to the selection (hold "shift" while you select unselected portions of the image) to select all the additional bits of gray - in her hair, mostly. Then I inverted the selection, contracted it by one pixel, and then feathered it by two. The contracting is done to get rid of background-colored pixels around the edge of the selection, while the feathering is done so the edges won't be jagged. I'd already set up the base for the image - I did a black 275 x 232 image and set the template over it as a new layer. Then I resized Rikku and put her in as a middle layer, under the template. Since I hadn't had to resize the image much, Rikku still looked too fuzzy around the edges and had a bit too much light gray on her. I accidentally hit bevel while I was fiddling around with her, and that apparently did the trick; it made her colors slightly darker, though no more than I might have done in image editing, and got rid of the fuzziness. Divine intervention, I guess, since I wasn't trying to do it. So I kept the effect. I didn't want a plain black background, though. I tried using custom brushes or picture tubes of playing-card symbols, but it didn't look good. Then I tried Google image search, which I rarely use unless it's for something like this. A search for "playing cards" got me about what you'd expect - I went with what's currently the second image on the second row. If you look at the URL, you'll see that it's for "Webundies.com" - apparently, the image I picked was a print used for boxer shorts. Which is why I don't tell people how I make my skins more often. Anyway, I blew up the image a bit, placed it over the black background as a new layer, and lowered the opacity so it wouldn't be distractingly bright and busy, and so the lowering of quality you get when you enlarge an image wouldn't show. Sometimes, editing can be a bit more complicated. For one thing, backgrounds can be a massive pain in the ass. Playing cards were the obvious choice in this case, where Rikku's a gambler-class character, has a club painted on her chest, and is holding a deck of cards in the full image, but background choices aren't always so obvious or so easy to find. And if you're trying to cut a character out of a background or a group image, far more editing will be required just to extract them. For an example of a time I did that, look at this image, and this skin, which resulted from it. Sometimes, even when you're working with a blank background, you'll run into problems - jagged edges are a massive pain in the ass. If you have a large image to work with you can minimize them, since resizing hides a lot of that, but if the image wasn't very large, you may run into problems there. This is why I recommend starting out with resize-and-crop images for skins while you're learning. Once you've selected and set up an image, you're ready to start skinning it. See the rest of the tutorial for further details. |