Userbar Tutorial

You may have seen userbars around the forums, they're kindof like signatures but a lot easier to make and very simple, small pictures, generally to show you're a part of something or you like something. (ie: "Naruto Fan", or "Illusionist Centurion", etc.)

Here are some examples of userbars:




Before we even start, you may want to read my Scanline Tutorial as scanlines generally add a very nice finishing touch to userbars and are extremely popular in the process of making them.

Now, there are two styles of making a userbar.

• Using a gradient with the same pronounced colors of a render, and placing said render over the gradient (makes a nice mixure of colors)
• Using a wallpaper

Due to ease, I'll go with the wallpaper method for now.

First off, make a 390x28 pixel weight:height canvas. (this can vary a bit, such as 350 width instead of 390, or 19/25 height instead of 28, and so on, depending on your preferences as always. I'm mostly only using a 28 pixel height to get more detail from the wallpaper I'm using.). Make the background transparent as usual.

For this tutorial I'm going to be making a basic "WoW Cataclysm" userbar since, well, I'm a fan of WoW Cataclysm xD and its easy to make. Thus, I'll be using this as my picture:
http://i56.tinypic.com/30ubvkk.jpg

It can be tricky finding wallpapers that fit in well, so you might just want to use mine for now. To begin, copy and paste the wallpaper onto the canvas. Resize it using Ctrl+T and holding Shift while dragging the edges until it fits in as you desire. It will probably be pretty small and hard to see, but don't worry, that's how userbars look most of the time and it should be fine in the end. Once its placed as you want it, go to Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen. Only do this once.


Now make a new layer and apply scanlines as desired. Set the layer to Soft Light or whatever you may choose.


Now select the Rectangular Marquee tool.


Zoom in (Ctrl++) until you feel like you can make a very precise selection of the upper half of the user bar, then drag the rectangular marquee from one of the upper corners, down to about half way through the image and to the other side.


Once you have a preferable selection made, make a new layer and use the Paint Bucket tool to fill the layer with the foreground (Set the foreground color is set to white for this step). If done correctly, the upper half of the userbar will be pure white, now set the layer to soft light to instead make it give the userbar a glossy overlay effect.


Make a new layer and go to Image > Apply Image.
When this step is done, right click the layer you just made (should be your 4th layer), then go to Blending Options.


Set a 1 pixel stroke positioned inside.


Now for finishing touches we just need to add a font. You almost always want to use a pixel font for userbars (you can always use other random fonts if you want the font to match a certain theme, but generally pixel fonts work wonders in any case).
Victor's Pixel Font and "Visitor" (Dimitra can provide the link for it) are both really good pixel fonts you can use.
Remember to use the font at a really small size. I simply typed in "World of Warcraft:" in one text layer, and "Cataclysm" in another, positioned vertically of each other.


Finally, with your text layer(s), right click them and repeat the same Blending Option step, applying a 1 pixel stroke around the text. However, for position, use Outside instead of Inside.


Now you should be done. This userbar (what I made) isn't anything special and you can make much better, usually with a smaller height than what I used for the tutorial, but at least this should show you how to easily make a userbar.

Enjoy

 

Alternative Option
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As I briefly mentioned above, you can also use a gradient and a render for making userbars. Heres a brief overview of how:

Obviously you'll need a render to start with. I used this as my render

Now select the eyedropper tool.


Use the eyedropper tool to select the 2 most pronounced colors in the render as your foreground and background (you usually want the background to be the darker of the 2).

To do this, just click in a colored area with the eyedropper tool to get that exact color copied to your foreground. Then you can use the little curved double arrow beside where your foreground & background boxes are to switch the two so you can set the foreground to the background instead (and the next color you copy will go to foreground again).




Once you have the two colors you like, select the gradient tool. At the top it'll have different versions of gradient you can use (Linear, Radial, Angle, etc.), set it to Linear.


Now select the top left of the canvas and drag it to the bottom right to get an even, nice looking gradient.


Now just put in your render in the desired location and you can follow the rest of the steps in the original tutorial. (Sharpening, Adding Scanlines, Applying Image, etc. etc.)

 

Was hoping you'd put one of these, I'll try it and post my results later.

 

Been looking for one of these.

The streakers thank you. I'll start on something tomorrow, and post an outcome as well.

User bars have always been hard for me, because I didn't know about scan lines and the other small details that you've provided.

Thanks for the tutorial, this helps a lot.

 

Yay! I fixed whatever line was erroring up in the second post :>

Stupid forum errors -.-

Thanks for your support guys and I hope you and Streakers (wat xD) will have some nice outcomes :O

 

My outcome:



Thank you very much for this tutorial.