I'm not a very good artist, but a story cover really does help people notice your work. So here is some advice for making a nice looking story cover with fairly minimal image editing skills.
Firstly, once the story is written I try to identify a type of image that would fit some generic, but recognizable, element of the story. With this idea in mind, I head over to google image search. Make sure to go to Tools and under Usage Rights select 'Labeled for reuse with modification'. This will help ensure that you don't run into copyright issues with the image you choose.
You want to select an image or part of an image that will fill the entire 'cover' or one with nicely placed blank area for your text. Don't worry about being able to read text on it, I have a solution to that later. Try to get an image with decent resolution as well so you don't have large messy pixelization everywhere.
I use Paint.net as my image editing program. It isn't nearly as robust as photoshop or paintertool sai, but it does have all the basic tools with far less complexity.
Load your image into Paint.net then save it in the programs .pdn format under a name appropriate for your project. Now we will get into the simple steps of taking that image and making a nice looking cover image.
1) Select and Crop to Selection to get the portion of the image you want to use. 2) (Optional) To change up the image a little and draw the eye to a specific point I use the Effects>Photo>Vignette. Place the center where you want to focus attention and adjust the Radius and Density to get the level of darkness you'd like surrounding it. I tend to like a Density around 60% - 70% but each image is going to be different. 3) Save. If this is part of a series or you will be reusing this template then Save As... with a more specific name for this specific story. 4) Make a new layer (call it something like White Text) and on this layer write your desired text in white, even if it is hard to read, don't worry. You should include the title as the largest item and in smaller text a few of the major kink warnings or particularly important notes for people to know what they will be getting into. 5) Use 'Magic Wand' tool, Shift+Ctrl click anywhere other than the text. Edit>Invert Selection (Ctrl+i) to grab all of the text (selecting the text directly often leaves some behind or grabs empty space as well). 6) Make a new layer (Black Text). On this new layer use a large paint brush to fill in the selection with black. 7) Deselect (or select everything, however you want to view that). Move the Black Text layer below White Text layer. 8) While on the Black Text layer go to Effects>Stylize>Outline. Raise Intensity to 100 and choose a Thickness that places a nice thin black line around the white text. For me, this tends to be 2 or 3 pixels. 9) To remove the white that the Outline tool just added simply use the 'Magic Wand' and Ctrl+Shift click on the white, then Delete it.
That's it. Not very difficult. The black outline on white text is readable on almost any background.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I've been using the bare bones basic built in paint app on my laptop for a long while and I've hated how small they always come out. Don't know how I never heard of or used this program lol
Thanks dude
Thank you so much for sharing this. I've been using the bare bones basic built in paint app on my la
