roseus-jaeger replied to your photo “Title: Fated Pairing: Victuuri (Victor Nikiforov/Katsuki Yuuri) Word...”
how do you make such nice looking covers?
I use Photoshop! On my Mac I had the full Adobe suite and used CS5, but on my new PC I only went for Elements, but it serves me just as well. I’ve been making basic graphics since I was probably, like, eleven or something? So for a more basic banner like this, I generally find a stock photo I really enjoy, then play with brushes and fonts.
For this, I used a stock photo from pexels and adjusted the colors to my liking, then the butterfly brush from Photoshop, which comes with the program and isn’t custom, though I do have custom brushes (butterflies are a consistent motif from OG Loveless), then applied a gradient to the brush to give it that crazy stripe-y appearance. I also used a custom font from dafont, which is basically my crack site. I hoard fonts. Seriously, oh my god, I never use pre-loaded fonts on literally anything I make. Always custom. They have so much more character.
(If you get into graphics making, try to always make sure you’re using open-sourced images that are ok for editing under Creative Commons licenses. Don’t steal people’s professional photography when there are other viable alternatives out there.)
My graphics usually tend to be simple, horizontal cuts with spacing in between and an eye-catching font. I sometimes do banners for friends upon request, like the one I did for @exile-wrath Black Swan AU, @farashasilver ‘s Vegas AU, and several for @lucycamui for her fics Hasetsu Nights, BMSCV, a promotional pic for Missed Connections, and several others yet to come. ;)
All the stuff I do is really basic aside from that. Magic selection wand tool and copy+paste, color adjustment, free transform. I never really have any sort of idea for what I’m doing before I start. For Fatum ad Momentum, I just made mishmashes of screencaps that were relevant to the scenes that chapter corresponded to (my favorite of which was for Stars).
But that’s really it! Nothing that can’t be learned from watching a 20-minute tutorial on Youtube on the functions of Photoshop, tbh. I don’t do anything too complicated, and for Fated, once I made the template, I just edited the text box for each chapter and saved it as an entire fuckton of .jpg files in a folder for me to use later.
ps, this is illegal mom advice, but if you don’t have photoshop there’s usually torrents available. but i didn’t tell you this, oh no. I just endorse the free program GIMP instead as a viable alternative.
