Do-It-Yourself Good Head Graphics
First, you will need some good image editing software. A recommended software is Adobe Photoshop. If you want free software, I suggest using Gimp, which can be downloaded from sourceforge.net.
To start creating a header graphic, first you will need a background. Some of the good backgrounds, which you can use for your header are cityscapes, urban locations, beaches, lakes and forests. Do take note of copyright issues. Otherwise, you can grab a digital camera and take photographs from some places near your house.
Now put the background photograph into Photoshop and crop the image. A preferred size would be 700×125 pixel for your background graphic. Then you can include pictures of people, animals, vehicles or your own picture on the right or left side of the image.
Do a search on Google, and you can find many clip-art collections available for use. The main idea is to get a picture that is related to your niche.
Once you have an picture on hand, you can resize it with Photoshop. Then you select Photoshop’s lasso tool to outline the main object in the picture and do a copy and paste on top of your background as a new layer. Move the object to the position where you wanted.
In order to make the object blend in with your background, you can zoom in and use the eraser tool to remove any untidy edges. Do set the eraser to 5-pixel in diameter and opacity to 100%.
Now to add the title and sub-heading text, you can use different colours to differentiate the sub-heading from the title. Next, you may choose either Arial, Impact or your preferred font and write your texts on a suitable spot on your background.
If you want to add special effects to your text, you just have to right click on the name of the text layer and select Blending Options from the menu. From there, you will have to experiment with the different styles till you are satisfied. A suggestion would be using a combination of Outer Glow and Drop Shadow. You can try out the Stroke style too.
After you are done, you can save the image as psd file so that you can make modification again or a jpg file to upload to your web server.
There you have it, some simple steps to create wonderful pictures. So have fun creating and designing your own graphics.
