Hello everyone in this fine morning (well morning for me) so in this occasion I would like to give you this tutorial it will be mainly for photoshop users, but don't be afraid GIMP users i'll give you an alternative to this =)

So the idea came after our talented Gemma wanted to make bumpers/icons the easy way, and believe me if you're using photoshop (I think from CS5+) you can do this in a snap!

Step 1
-Create a 100x100 file (transparent)

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Step 2
-Open the image you want to use and copy-paste in the new file
Ctrl + a = Select the entire image | Ctrl + c = Copy | Ctrl + v= paste

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Step 3
-Resize your image using any method you want (Remember to always hold shift when resizing an image)

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Step 4
-Click the 'rectangle box' and create a new one on top of the new layer then move it under the image, you'll see that a properties box will pop up, LEAVE IT THERE DON'T CLOSE IT BECAUSE IS WHAT WE NEED!

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Step 4.1
-Let me introduce you to the properties of the rectangle tool and the other shapes under the rectangle tool, this box will make your live easy for this purpose. The parts highlighted in yellow are the options we are going to use for this tutorial.

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Step 5
-This part will be difficult for older versions of photoshop, but I think it was available since photoshop cs4 if I'm wrong let me know. Please read carefully because it will be a bit confusing at first.
-Place your mouse between the 2 images while holding 'alt' on your keyboard
-You'll see that your pointer will turn into a down pointer with a small rectangle
-Make a click and you'll see how the image 'goes down' into the rectangle, what happened here is that the rectangle became the 'only layer' if you move the rectangle you'll see part of the image disappears, it kind of acts as a mask layer.

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Step 6
-Add your colorings, your brightess and any other resource you want to use, but remember that each layer that you create must be 'inside' the rectangle

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Step 7
-The fun part beggins~ time to play around with the properties. Let's first create a shape different than the pointed corner that we know you see this part

-Click the middle lock, this will release all the corners and will just work on the one you want to. So let's just modify the upper left corner and the bottom right corner.

-Click the 0 and change it for 20, you'll see how the corners become rounder

-Nice! Let's add more stuffs, what about a rounded border? So I clicked the color next to the background (the one with a line across) that's the border line the numbers next to it are the thickness of the border I set my thickness to 3 and picked the color blue from my swatches.

-But I want to add a second border, so I zoomed the canvas so I can be more precise and resized a little bit the rectangle (only this resize!!!) your image might look odd now so move it if necessary.

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Step 8
-Now double click the rectangle and the layers style box will pop up, next click the Stroke button you'll see that another border was added to your image, let's fix this a little bit because by default the border is 3, so change it to a 2, the position change it to inside and the color change it to one that looks good with your bumper. Here are my settings:

-The result is this

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Step 9
-Time to add a font! So remember that the BEST fonts to use in this case are the pixel-type fonts, you can find this type of fonts in this link. So for this example I'll be using my favorite tiny font ' Ernest', do whatever you feel it's necessary to your font in order to make it look good, I decided to once again open the layer style options and here are my settings

-NOTE: this is the most important setting, your tiny font MUST be in none and under 10px of size.


-I duplicated the font and added to the bottom and the final result is this!


This is it~! really easy right? ^_^

Until next time!

#ag #agtutorial #agphotoshop