Speedometer Faces!

I made a more actuate speedo face, for Neon. MPY.

Neon, I think I'll will change out the speedo face. If I get pulled over for speeding. The cop will ask me how fast I was going. I'll tell him, as fast as a walker.

Neonspinnazz said:

The reason I put this one on hold is my lack of Photoshop experience. I would like the Rage Faces to be transparent so they'll light up at night...I don't have the Photoshop prowess to do that!

Anyone out there with Photoshop skills that can help?

Click to expand...

I don't have mad Photoshop skills, but I am not too bad at GIMP. Below is a tutorial I created while making Neon's faces transparent on his speedo. Some of these directions are specific to the file I was working with but I think they are generic enough to be of use:

1. Before I started I created a new layer to work on. In the case of this file I created a layer called ‘NoRageFace’ that is a copy of Layer 33 – the black background image that is needed behind your actual speedo face to block light from areas you don't want lit up. I used a black paint brush to paint over all the numbers on the layer since some of the rage faces did not totally cover the numbers and leaving them ‘clear’ would cause light to show through where you did not want it. Note: You may need to print two of these black layers on transparency to get nicely defined edges on your night time speedo face – and lining them up is extremely important.
2. Make the layer with the image you want to remove from the black background the only visible layer – in your case this is ‘Layer 10 copy’ – the layer with the rage faces.
3. Make sure the layer with the image you want to remove from the black background is also the selected layer. You can have ‘Layer 10 copy’ as the only visible layer – but have a different layer selected (The selected layer will be highlighted in blue in the layers window). You will know you have the wrong layer selected when you see nothing changing even though you are applying changes to the layer. If this happens the multi-undo in Gimp is your best friend.
4. Zoom to 800 or 1600
5. Clean up the edges of the artwork with pencil - down to 1 pixel in tight areas - otherwise I use 10 pixels for the pencil size. In this case you paint the non-white pixels white (or whatever the background color of the image is - use the eyedropper to get the background color) to give a better defined edge to the graphic – check your layer ‘Layer 10 copy’ to see how I cleaned up the image. The cleaner the edge - the better it will look when printed - and the easier it is to select from the background.
6. If the image is just an outline use the scissors tool to select around the outside of the image. For the images with large areas of black in them – I used the lasso tool instead of the scissors and cut just slightly outside the black edges so the whole image would light up at night. Note: You can use shift-click and any of the selection tools to adjust where the selection line is placed – sometimes the ‘intelligent’ selection is not so smart… (pun intended?) I have all the selection tools set to Antialiasing, Feather edges (Radius 10) and Interactive Boundary. This way the cut-out will have smooth edges and look nice behind the image you are removing.
7. Once you have the selection of the image to your liking chage to the black background the only visible layer.
8. Make sure the black background layer is also selected.
9. Select ‘Edit – Cut’. This will remove the outline of the image from the black background allowing the light to shine through – but only in the area you had selected on the image layer.
10. Once again make the Layer with the image to be removed the only visible layer and be sure it is also the selected layer. From the top menu choose 'Select - None' to stop the selection of the current image.
11. Lather, Rinse, Repeat for any additional images you want to remove from the black background.
Let me know if you have questions or comments

Santa Michael