On Thu, 2013-01-24 at 05:30 +0100, RogueRanger wrote:
[...]I just spoke with a friend on facebook, she recommends making my original signature size double of what I need to end up with, which for my forum is 300*110 pixels = 600*220 to get sharper looking text and then reduce it back to the size I need. Is she correct?
It's a good technique to try. If you do it, 1. save a copy of the image as full-size.xcf.gz or full-size.xcf 2. use image->flatten so you only have one layer. 3. use image->scale to 50%, with Cubic interpolation 4. use filters->enhance->sharpen, maybe about 20% will be good.
Also is there a way to put a fine black border around the text like in my other ones?
Several ways - see Michael Hammel's book (no, I don't get paid for plugging it :-) ) or search the Web for gimp 2.8 tutorials. One way: 1. duplicate the text layer 2. use select by colour on the text, so the outline of the text is selected; 3. select->Border Selection by 2 pixels 4. with the lower copy of the text active, use control-, (control-and comma) to fill the outline with the foreground colour (use "d" first to set it to the default black and white if you need to). 5. use Select->None to get rid of the marching ants selection so you can do other things :-) If you combine this with the drop shadow, you'll end up with three layers - the text, the outline under it, and the drop shadow under that. I forgot to mention before - after doing blur for the drop shadow, you may need colour->desaturate (choose "preserve luminosity" for a smoother effect) and maybe colour->curves, drag the curve downwards a little in the middle until the shadow is about the right darkness. There are other ways to do each of these things, but I'm trying to give you some ways that don't involve learning too many new things about GIMP all at the same time. Some people would prefer to use "paths" to do the outline, for example. I'll enclose a really ugly example xcf file so you can see the layers. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
Attachment:
italic-font.xcf
Description: image/xcf