Feedback (AKA: criticism)

@Flei I thought I was the only one who thought looking for resources as an adventure! I practically scream with pleasure when I find something fun and can't wait to work with it!

@Chawsu, I can help you with 1 and 4


1) Your obstacle with one is that it doesn't pop out right? First thing I realize with your sigs is that there is no definite FLOW. I also heard you were looking for textures/backgrounds? good first step.

Now there's this thing call depth I use most of the time. I can be achieved by blurring and sharpening certain points of a signature.
For example, this signature (probably not the best, but I have hundreds of sigs I can't dig through! lol)

or this
(Notice how the shards of glass and his hand is sharpened, but part of his body and background is blurred?
This was a little tricky. His hand had to be duplicated, sharpened and placed in a new layer on top of the white bar I placed at the bottom since there was nothing sufficient to blur)

or this (Her scarf and ends of hair are blurred, the guns and face are sharpened)

(the building are blurred around him but the face is sharpened.)

The best way to achieve this is by blurring central parts of the characters, around their immediate body.
I try to think of it as three layers. background, medium-ground and foreground.

Background-textures, little details, SOME lighting etc WARNING! Do Not blur all of the background, that will kill the signature at times

Medium-ground- Character of signature

Foreground- you have to PUT something here, to give the allusion that the character is far away. Use splatter brushes, or masking or even part of the character and blur it.

2)I think looks cute already with hinakick's art

3) just needs some more textures. I see you have some music bars at the bottom of 3, make them stand out more. If everything is blended too much, it won't make for an eye catching signature

4) Grunge doesn't always mean, red and bloody. It means at times the sig is darkened more, no serious bright lighted colors. Never rule out anything asa texture, even if part of it doesn't work another part will.

I hope I was helpful enough!!

wow ; v ; everyone here is so good >w< I'm only 13 so please don't be to hard on me ; r ;

loveusender - Thank you very much for your feedback. Now I understand. Your explanation is very clear with pics attached. Thank you for being thorough. I really appreciate the detailed explanation. I will take those suggestions into account when I'm making sigs. HUGS.

cielnekoneko - I really like the attention you paid to the centre piece. My eyes are drawn to the boys, they're lighter than their darker background. My only suggestion is may be you might want to change the colour of the font? It's not very clear. But overall, very well done, very beautiful sig.

Well Haltie75 pointed me in this direction for a recent creation I made. It's Cain and Abel from Starfighter and I am using, in my opinion, the sucky program of PhotoFiltre since that is the only one I can use. Here's the picture and the quote was something random. Went through a lot of filters, contrasting and a bit of sharpening to get it this way.



Anything to improve upon or add?

AarinsRitsuka: I can't help much since you're using a program I don't know about, but I can give some general pointers. =D

I think some background would be great because in overall the sig seems too simple. The base also seems a bit blurred, which I don't think works well usually with darker sigs. Maybe make the sig b&w? If you add a texture/background and then make the entire sig b&w, it would look pretty nice.

And uh, that's all I can really say. orz I wish I knew more about PhotoFiltre. If you explore the program you might find a few useful effects/adjustments, maybe?

Hola!
I just re-used photoshop like... few days ago? I stopped for a while after I became busy with some stuffs.
I use Photoshop CS3. I tried CS4, but I'm still more accustomized to CS3.
I think I know that my biggest weakness is backgrounds. So, I guess you will notice that.
I also rarely use brushes. I just don't know how to use them properly. So... you can really say I'm a newbie.
Anyways, here we go..


This one don't have that much effort at all. No textures and other complicated stuffs are use.. simply because I don't know what other more to add. /sigh


This one was my very first sig in my entire life. No kidding. I always make avii (200 x 600), but this time I tried making sig.. which obviously failed. Again, just like I said, I never used that much complicated stuff. I also don't know what is that mask or something. I fail. Did I already said that? loveusender's feedback for Chawsu helped me a lot too. I think I would be doing that someday.

Hoping for feedbacks... and expecting negative ones.
Thank you

BeArOcKpRiNxEsS: In your first graphic, everything looks great except for the black box with your name. Overall, it's a light and pretty graphic, so the sudden splash of black is very jarring. If you just remove it and gave your name a 4-5px stroke with a dark pink/purple, it'd look great! <3

And... that has to be the best first sig attempt I've ever seen. Like, ever. My complaint would be that the bg is too green. If you add a bit more blues to match with the render, it might look better. Also, the drop shadow/outer glow effect doesn't look too complimentary, but that might be just me. Awesome job though! =D I can see you'll be great at sigs very soon.

Oh, and if you're having problems with backgrounds, I'd suggest using textures and patterns. I am super guilty of spamming my sigs with both of them. orz But yeah, they really help if you're stuck on a bg.

@Flei; Like... THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THE FEEDBACK !
No really, thank you! I'd be putting all your reminds in my heart. ()
Okay, so.. I decided to make ANOTHER sig yesterday of yesterday, when the internet was cut so I decided to edit. >o<"
Anyways, again... the background... ||OTL
This sig by the way is not really for Aarin, but rather personal uses.
I'm having a hunch that the quote part was... err.. not good with the pink and other girly color. But I can't really think of any nice one.
And since I suck at rendering, I decided to stroke the main pic with white, lower the capacity and other stuff.. Is it just really fine?
Critic, again?

BeArOcKpRiNxEsS: Happy to help! <3

Okay, so here comes my advice:
1. I noticed that the text for 'username' is black; unless your set is black & white or very dark (i.e. at least 30% of it is black), you shouldn't use black text. It's better to use colors that compliment the colors already in the sig OR a color that's actually in the sig itself. When in doubt, use white—but never black.
2. The extra pic in the upper left corner seems too distracting and out of place. I'd suggest you remove it. If the sig looks too empty, crop from the main render and make a squared image similar to the one you have now. Maybe something like this or this? You could also add vectors, C4Ds, patterns, and many other things to fill in the space.
3. The gray text box should go. It doesn't blend well with a bright and colorful sig. You should try to incorporate stroke, drop shadow, or outer glow text affects to pretty things up.

Aaand that's all I have to say, I think. ;; Sorry if I sound super picky or anything, but I'm trying to point out the essential do's and don'ts.

Putting a stroke on the main pic with a lowered opacity looks totally fine, so no worries there. The background is done well and the colors 'pop' nicely. I really like what you did with this sig. =D

Hello ~ I had a stab at making a sig and this is the end result:



I used Photoshop CS5. I wasn't really sure how to go about it so this is purely trial and error. I just started adding textures and played around with the opacity and layer settings. I have a few specific questions I'd like to ask anyone willing to give me feedback ~
- Does the background go with the pic?
- Is it too cluttered? I may have gone overboard with the textures ...
Any comments are greatly appreciated, I honestly don't know whether this is ok or terrible, this is a first for me so bash away