I'm thinking about making banners/headers for my own fics, so I'd appreciate as much detail as I can get! 😁
Sorry to keep you waiting!
Okay without further ado:
A very basic guide to making banners and Youtube backgrounds in GIMP!
Okay so first off let’s open a new file.
For YouTube backgrounds and banners on Tumblr mobile, the best ratio is 1.78:1. So your looking to make the image sizes at 1280x720 (YouTube HD) or 640x360 (YouTube Standard & Tumblr Mobile).
I’m going with 640x360 because that’s what I use for YouTube, because a lot of the mangacaps I use aren’t bigger than 1000x800 so would look distorted when you put YouTube into fullscreen mode.
Straight away from there, I go back into File < Open as Layers, then select the image I want to use for my background. This will open the image as a new layer in the project, meaning you will be able to work on it separately from the background.
In this instance I’m demonstrating with the Bakugou image I used in his Spin the Bottle video background.
Only problem is the image is too big to fit the image size. It’s an easy fix!
Go to the ‘Layer’ tab at the top of the screen < Scale Layer. From there it will ask you to alter the sizes.
Changing either the width or height size will also alter the other one to keep your layer in the correct ratio.
If this isn’t the case, make sure the ratio is ‘locked’ by clicking on the button just to the right of the layer dimensions so that it looks like a padlock instead of broken.
It can be trial and error, figuring out how much to scale the layer down by. If you don’t like the amount it was scaled down in your first try, make sure you go to Edit < Undo, then try a different scale amount.
If you try scaling the layer repeatedly it will distort the image and make it really pixelated.
Great! He’s shrunk. But now you want to remove the white background so it’s just Bakugou on the your intended background layer.
With plain images like this it’s really easy. All you have to do is click on the Magic Select Tool/Fuzzy Select tool found in the tools bar then click on the bits you want to delete and delete them by pressing the delete button on your keyboard (one at a time for this very quick tutorial).
Make sure the ‘threshold’ isn’t set too high (bottom left of the screen in the tool options). The higher the threshold, the more of your picture it’s going to select instead of just the solid white colour.
It doesn’t matter too much with this picture because the lines are very clean and there are no gaps but say, on an image with colour, fiddle with the threshold option to select the right amount to delete.
If you’ve deleted the background and it looks too sharp; you can see some of the white remaining from the original Bakugou image, then go down to the bottom of the tools bar when you have the Magic Select/Fuzzy Select tool in use, then alter the feathering radius to a couple of pixels, then try re-deleting.
It should make everything look a lot smoother and cleaner. Don’t do too much of a feathering though, or you’ll lose parts of Bakugou’s outline!
Right, you’ve deleted the background! No, wait. You haven’t. You just followed the steps I gave you, but instead of having a transparent background on the Bakugou layer, it’s changed to the colour of your secondary selected colour.
What’s going on?
Sometimes this happens. It depends on the image you’re importing. In which case, you need to give the layer an ‘Alpha channel’ which means you’ll be able to delete the background properly.
So if that’s happened, ‘Undo’ until you get the white background back then go to:
Layer < Transparency < Add Alpha Channel. If this option is greyed out then you already have an Alpha channel on that particular layer so you’ll be able to make it transparent already.
This time when you delete the background, voila! It’s actually gone.
But because you feathered it to take away some of the harshness, you need to select the erase tool then go over the white lines that will still be left there at the boundaries of the original image.
Once you’re happy with your Bakugou, swap back onto the base background layer (the one you started with) in the bottom right of the screen, then jazz up your background however you want!
If you want to add text then go to the tool bar again and hit the icon with the big ‘A’ on it. Before you start typing, make sure your text is the colour you want it to be, the font, etc, then click on your image and start typing.
The text will create its own separate layer that you can move without bothering the rest of the image.
[ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT LAYER, AND UNDO IS YOUR BEST FRIEND]
If you change your mind about colour/font/etc. then in the layers tab in the bottom right of the screen, double click on the text layer by clicking the image of it, not the text (if you click the text it will think you’re trying to rename the layer),
Then ctrl+A if you’re using Windows to select the text, then you’ll be able to edit it as you want.
I hope this really basic tutorial covered some of your questions, but if you have any more then feel free to drop another message and I’ll go over your specific question in more detail.
