You know, the way you are making progress, you might just get the hand of it.
One thing let me tell you...
Some people tell beginners that checking out tutorials can give good outcomes but i don't like that. Tutorials should just help to beginners to know the processes to how they should work.
Like all you need to know is proper placement of layers, appropriate textures and appropriate colors and blending modes-opacity etc, and slowly-slowly you get the things automatically coming to you when you start your sig. And then you follow tuts for more ideas...
As for now. Take these tips...
1. Backgrounds shoud be less complicated (unless the main purpose of the sig or wall is to highlight the bg.) Press Ctrl + T before resizing renders, this maintains the shape of your render.
2. When you put render effects after duplicating your render layer, always start working from the bottom most render layer.(if you need, click on "eye" button on the top render layers to make them invisible..) Put some textures behind the render if you want and erase a bit of the edges of the render with 50% flow of the eraser to blend the render...(this is the easiest method to blend renders for beginners, atleast for me it was.)
3. When you put textures on your canvas (canvas means the sig or wall you are working on..), and put them on different modes, you may need to rotate them, so use Ctrl+T method...and sometimes you find that some textures don't give the right color, so you can recolor them with ctrl+u or desaturate them (ctrl+shift+u)....and sometimes a part of the texture seems to spoil the sig, so erase that part (remember to use the round erasers with blurring/soft edges)....and remember adjusting opacity is important too...
4. Try different texts, and keep them small and near renders (if they are about the render offcourse) , and keep them simple (don't mess with colors and effects on texts too much)...and try different fonts on the same sig...(like first name with different font, second name with another)...
5. You can find put some additional layer of color balance, selective color, photo filter (layers>new adjustment layers) etc....oh and remember brightness/contrast is also important...
6. Put the whole image after finishing in one layer and sharpen image...(if necessary..) Borders could also be good...
I'll post a tutorial i made long time back... So finally, after reading this, see the tutorial i'll post after some time in the tuts thread (its totally for beginners, you'll have no problem understanding it...) and try to link what i said to the tutorial and you'll understand how to go about sigs...
PS: the tut is a very old one, i'm posting it actually for you only
,I am not meant to the pic.
