General tips for photoshopping, feel free to add any you use.


Mine:

Expand your font collection. DaFont is good. Don't go overboard, though, sometimes Times New Roman is the best option.

Expand your brush collection, DeviantArt has a lot of (searchable) Photoshop brushes.

If you can't decide on what font looks best, select your text layer (not the actual text), hit the text tool, and scroll through the fonts with your mouse scroll wheel - stop when something looks good.

Don't overdo it on size - can't stress this enough. Signatures are meant to accent your posts, not dominate them. Their attention should be focused on what you're saying, with an artistic ending at the bottom, not the signature as the main event.

Another size note - keep the measurements even, and keep the resolution high. I use 100 res and 350x150 as my "Signature" preset, I suggest you use the same res (or higher), and keep the measurements in that vein. 325 x 125, or some such. The reason for this is it makes it really easy to go back and scale it down, while preserving everything. The same is true of avatars, if you're making your own large scale.

If you're trying to "color" something in that isn't all one shade - use Image -> Adjustments -> Hue Saturation and check "Colorize". It preserves the shade change but still changes the color.

If you're trying to get rid of a pictures background, duplicate the layer and add a layer mask and do all your erasing there. You won't always go back and undo the erasing, but it's nice to be able to.

If the picture isn't the greatest resolution and that's hard to do, you can use the smudge and blur tools to just spread the background out and make it illegible.

Drag and close all the windows in the top right (Brushes, Actions, etc) except for "Layers" and "History". Also drag these out of the toolbar, and dock them on top of each other on the Left-Hand side. It comes in handy, and those two windows are all you'll ever really need to use.

When finished, completely finished, add a border to your background layer (if it's locked, ie, the layer is italics texted and you can't add effects, double click it and hit Ok). 1pt inside stroke of black works okay, if the background is black, use white or a dark gray. If you want to get fancy you can use a 1pt black stroke and 2 pt white (or gray) inner glow, 100% Opacity, Precise, 100% Threshold, Normal, Anti-Aliased (or not, sometimes it looks weird). *


*Examples:

Simple 1 pt stroke:



With a black stroke before it: