For the record
For my own records, and also for anyone who might be interested in the creation process, here's how the No Promises banner came into being.
The fic is a dark and angsty one, so the choice of pictures was governed by that - no happy, smiling faces.
The backgrounds of the two photos dictated the shading of the piece - the Danny photo had an almost black background on one side, while Steve was a silhoutette against white sky, so I set up a gradient layer grading from black to white across the banner, and superimposed the photos (suitably clipped) onto that.
Colouring: the Danny photo was quite harshly coloured, so I knocked the saturation right back and sampled from the image to colour the photo of Steve (which was black and white to start with). The colouring for the banner jumped off from the colours in the photo of Danny.
The background textures are two photos. One is a photo of crumpled brown paper, added as a new layer, made into a negative of itself and overlaid. This is what gives the graininess of texture and some variation in the shading of the gradient background. The second is a photo of the back of a floor tile, again added as a new layer, made into a negative and overlaid, then knocked back to 50% transparency. I liked the way it echoed the shower tiles in the fic. The tile layer is over the photo layers, with the pattern erased over the faces etc - this allows some of the pattern to bleed over the edges of the photos (see Danny's shoulder by the text) to help to tie the whole thing together and make it look less like a load of layers.
Text was added, aligned to tie in with the tile pattern, 'screen' applied to make it stand out from the darker background and let the texture of the background show through a little, and a slight drop shadow added just to make it stand out a bit more.
I added some spatter via brushes to liven up blank areas, then played with lightening and darkening areas of the piece until I was happy with the balance.
Final step was to darken the very edges slightly so that it stands out against a pale background.
The fic is a dark and angsty one, so the choice of pictures was governed by that - no happy, smiling faces.
The backgrounds of the two photos dictated the shading of the piece - the Danny photo had an almost black background on one side, while Steve was a silhoutette against white sky, so I set up a gradient layer grading from black to white across the banner, and superimposed the photos (suitably clipped) onto that.
Colouring: the Danny photo was quite harshly coloured, so I knocked the saturation right back and sampled from the image to colour the photo of Steve (which was black and white to start with). The colouring for the banner jumped off from the colours in the photo of Danny.
The background textures are two photos. One is a photo of crumpled brown paper, added as a new layer, made into a negative of itself and overlaid. This is what gives the graininess of texture and some variation in the shading of the gradient background. The second is a photo of the back of a floor tile, again added as a new layer, made into a negative and overlaid, then knocked back to 50% transparency. I liked the way it echoed the shower tiles in the fic. The tile layer is over the photo layers, with the pattern erased over the faces etc - this allows some of the pattern to bleed over the edges of the photos (see Danny's shoulder by the text) to help to tie the whole thing together and make it look less like a load of layers.
Text was added, aligned to tie in with the tile pattern, 'screen' applied to make it stand out from the darker background and let the texture of the background show through a little, and a slight drop shadow added just to make it stand out a bit more.
I added some spatter via brushes to liven up blank areas, then played with lightening and darkening areas of the piece until I was happy with the balance.
Final step was to darken the very edges slightly so that it stands out against a pale background.