Although that way is fast you would probably have a bit of trouble finding one that a good size for your eye, since any time you expand or shrink an image a lot of quality can be lost and it leads to less appealing manips, plus making your own spiral leads to less artistic restrictions, and skewing the corners isnt a problem, in fact it can lead to better results

I don't often do spiral manips just because I find them a tad corny buuUUUut what I would do is make a square selection, roughly around the size of the eye, fill the square and make one half one color and the other half another, Filter>distort>twirl>set to 999 and do that twice to get a twirl with the colors and size I want. Then I cut out the characters eyes and place the spirals underneath and adjust the size accordingly, if I want the pupils to still be seen I just ctrl+X>ctrl+V them and lower the opacity.



NOW this is one thing I think ALL manippers should account for when doing spirals because I've been seeing it a lot lately and personally I don't think it looks very good, its a matter of opinion but it is still worth noting: When you apply a spiral, make sure the eye doesn't loose its depth, put a white circle, dot, shape, any sort of shine on the eye and a bit of shading if need be.
So if the original pic had a shadow going across the side with a shine dot, put a shadow going across the side with a shine dot over the spiral so it doesnt look forced in.
I made a quick example with some random cat girl on my HD
No shine/shading i.imgur.com/kbVv13A.jpg
Yes shine/shading i.imgur.com/1N5QRAP.jpg

I also put a touch of purple in the center in the second one to add vibrance and so it doesnt look plain

I used GIMP once years ago, and all I remember was PEPPERS EVERYWHERE
if gimp has a blur tool/soft brushes and layer modes then it should work out just fine

Just gave it a test drive, works like a dream!
GLOWY EYES EVERYWHERE! @u@

Command me my hypnotic beauties!! Mwahahahaha!

*ahem* anyways, your instructions helped immensely. I was beating myself up trying to figure out how to make my manips glow! :D Thanks so much! :3

no prob, I have been using things like SAI and photoshop a lot for the last 4 years so I can get around them pretty well.
If anyone needs help with manipping something and don't know how to accomplish it I'd be willing to give a few pointers

So guys
I made a Spiral eyes tutorial if anyone is interested

i.imgur.com/Lngndjp.png

Hopefully any newbies who need a place to start off can follow this at least until they develop their own styles

My question however is does this go against the criteria of what is allowed to be posted on the actual booru, I mean, it does technically have the porn in it but since I never see any tutorials posted on the booru I assume it is against the rules

I was going for "quickest and easiest spiral eyes possible." :p

Anyway spirals are almost universally larger than the target size, so you don't risk losing detail because you can just scale down. If it gets too noisy because the features are getting to small, you just stop scaling down and mask at whatever size you happen to reach. If that still doesn't work, it's not a good pattern for an eye to begin with.

That said, thanks for expanding step 1, sometimes you do just wanna make your own spiral. Great tutorial image.

That was a very well done tutorial. I was actually planning to make something like that myself eventually, to a similar effect. Although, I also find spiral eyes to be cheesy (as well as lazy and unauthentic) I still had a tutorial for them my list of things to do. So having you make one for them is actually a huge relief for me. Thanks Zko, you're really awesome.


Edit (P.S.): My IN has been down for about 2 and half days so no one comment on how late this is...

A little more beginner-y tip, but if you're using GIMP (dunno if other programs have an equivalent) and you're open to the idea of a little cleaning or redrawing, the path tool is your friend.

Here's a really basic technique for adding <<i.imgur.com/KXWrsRj.jpg|outlines to text>>, but maybe this will be helpful to someone. Unfortunately, I'm not talented enough to make one of those pretty picture tutorials. Note: I only use GIMP, so that's what this tutorial will address.

* Place your text as normal.
* Right click the "Layers" tab. Select "New Layer", and choose "Transparency" under "Layer Fill Type".
* Move the new layer to just below the text layer.
* Right click the text layer and choose "Alpha to Selection" near the bottom.
* Click "Select" in the menu bar, and choose "Grow".
* Increase the selection by your desired number of pixels (my example uses 3).
* Make your transparent layer the active layer again, and fill in the selected space with your chosen color.

If you want to make your text outline look more "glowy", with your transparent layer selected, go to "Filters", "Blur", and "Gaussian Blur". By using the preset of 5, you make your outline look like <<i.imgur.com/7yedKPR.jpg|this>>.

I could explain how to make speech bubbles too, but that one will probably require visual aids.

I might as well tell people how to do that on photoshop since it can come in handy, although I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only manipper here who uses Photoshop .-.

1.Double click the Text Layer or right click it and press Blending Options
2. FOR AN OUTLINE select Stroke and configure the setting however you please.
3. FOR A GLOW select Outer Glow and configure the setting however you please

done, you can also add drop shadows, inner glows, gradient overlays, etc with the other blending options if you so choose.

It's just that... you know... GIMP is free and Photoshop isn't.



Come to think of it... You can probably use the stroke tool in GIMP and skip several steps... I need to check this.

Edit: It doesn't really work like I thought it would.

Who actually pays for Photoshop though--

That's true, unfortunate since it makes a lot of things really easy.
<<www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ju_10NkGY|on a completely unrelated note who's up to listening to some tunes>>

I think that other thread's essence is leaking into this one...
Maybe, just a little...
Cool.

I wasn't sure which of the threads to post this in. (It could have been this one or the "Creative Manips Brainstorming" thread.)

I remember back on Hypno-chan in the Creativ Development board there was a thread where HiG posted a drool tutorial. I lost it and the site went down so... I was just wondering if anyone else might be able to make another one. I liked the one that HiG made but I feel like it would only be applicable to images of a certain art style.

I believe the explanation that Zko gave about making drool back on the booru was very multifaceted. I tried it once for myself but I think I messed up the image. If anyone could make a tutorial or two for adding drool I would be most appreciative.