My tips for captions & text:

#1 - How much space for text?

If your text doesn't fit into the body of the image, look at your dimensions. Whichever edge is shorter, double the length of the image on that edge, and put your text to the right or bottom of the image. If you need more space, add the original dimension to the other side and spread the text on both sides of the picture.

This means that if you have a tall picture, you should double the width and try to fit your text on the right. If you have a wide picture, you should double the height and try to fit your text on the bottom. If you need more space, you can put equal amounts of space on both sides of the basic image. If the image is a square, or very nearly square, you can use either edge -- but I would recommend square images get vertical extensions for text.

Finally, I feel it is more forgivable to have images with tall text spaces than wide text spaces. In general, we western language users are wired to reach text in fairly narrow columns but across tall pages, so having a tall page topped by an image is easier on the audience than a wide page with text flowing all the way to the edge. Of course, at the same time, too narrow of an image (relatively speaking) can be awkward for us too!

#2 - What Font Settings?

Never type text if you can't see the full width or height of the image. If your image is too tall or too wide to fit on your screen, zoom it out in your editor until you can see it all. If it isn't clear, your audience will see it as an unclear mess. If your text is too small to read when the image fits on your screen, increase it until it is not only clear, but charp and clear! Reduce your word count if necessary.

For font, the options are wide -- I like to use handwriting style fonts for many of my manips, and I've settled on a free one called "Architect's Daughter" which is clean, has consistent angles, and looks decent for diary style or comic style text.

#3 - What to Say?

Don't waste words describing the image contents. The image already shows us the color of your character's hair or eyes, as well as the clothes or whatever focus you might be using. Every word you add for a caption is precious, so waste as few of them as possible. This doesn't mean you can't refer to the image -- but make it meaningful if you do.

#4 - To Color or Not To Color?

Colors can be very useful to communicate character identity, but not every image needs colored text. If you do use colored text, use colors that clearly connect to the character or characters -- hair and eye color are good options, though clothing can be useful too if that's more distinct in the image. Use colors with good contrast to the background, and if you can't do that, use some form of outline on the text. There are guides on how to use Layer Styles in photoshop up above -- using a high contrast text border can make your text more legible even if the contrast is good to start with.

I think it's about time that I shared this. This is my method for creating a dazed expression in anime manips. I've used it in pretty much all of my manips.

It's a simple matter of using one of the selection tools to select each of the eyelashes of any character.
I tend to do them separately and then put them on separate layers.
After that you need only lower them over the irises and use the smudge tool (on your preferred setting) to smudge the skins color over every part from where you cut out the eyelashes to where the you've lowered them.

The same technique can be applied to making the eyes roll in an image. Select the irises cut them out on separate layers each and then fill in the sclera with the smudge tool.

You could also use paint brush tools or clone stamp tools.

The mouths can be a bit trickier. As I see it you have about four options.

1. The easiest way is to find an image of a similar style with the mouth that you want and then swap it.

2. Method number two is to select the mouth of the image and dice it up. You can sometimes trans-configure the mouth of an image by selecting the mouth and segmenting it and rearranging everything until you get what you want.

3. You can use one of the warping tools of whatever image editor you are using to alter the mouth but it might turn out blurry depending on the tool.

4. The fourth method is just a complete redraw of the mouth in question.

Of course any combination of these four may likely prove to be effective. It's always good experiment.

I hope that's clear enough for everyone. If it's not please ask me to clarify.

The previous page has some good tips on text from kharonalpua, which made me realize that not enough time has been spent giving tips on text. A search for the caption_only tag reveals a very depressing collection almost entirely of BACKGROUND->FONT FACE/SIZE/COLOR->PASTE TEXT->MAKE SURE THERE'S TOO MUCH EMPTY SPACE LEFT OVER->UPLOAD but it <<hypnohub.net/post/show/18507|doesn't>> <<hypnohub.net/post/show/19871|have>> <<hypnohub.net/post/show/18140|to>> <<hypnohub.net/post/show/11309|be>> <<hypnohub.net/post/show/9462|that>> <<hypnohub.net/post/show/19955|way>>.

Spend time on your text. If your manip has a caption of any notable length, the first viewing of your image will spend more time on your text than on the image. You do not want the user consciously thinking about the effort of reading the text too much. Clarity and readability are critical, and that includes clarity of intention regarding who is saying what in what tone of voice and in what emotional state. You can help convey these things entirely with creative typesetting.

In my mind gluing plain text onto an image format is just awkward. If you think your caption is worth uploading, then give that text and everyone reading it the respect they both deserve and try to make that text a naturalized citizen of the image medium. I have several favorites that violate this principal, but they'd be even better if they didn't.

I wish there was a site where we could write erotic MC light novellas and insert appropriate images (that we didn't make) at appropriate points in the story. Hell, I ended up causing the creation of the caption_only tag on an image that was doing exactly that. An image booru is not that site. Even on a manip that isn't caption_only, you should expect to spend at least half of your manip time getting the script into the image. Yes, when your image manip is done, if you're adding a caption and want to do it right, you're only halfway done.

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I intended this to be a PSA but upon reading it back and editing it several times (because text is important) I realize the above looks like <<hypnohub.net/forum/show/29755|bitching about lazy manips>>. The goal was actually that I think too many people don't even realize how important text is, just like people don't usually realize how important the bassline of a song is. Most people won't notice if it's there or not. But if it's not there, it seems "meh" even they can't put their finger on it.

So, here's some other general tips on text:

If you have a long caption, there will be typos. In fact, more than usual because you were horny when you wrote it. I'm sure I wrote this before, but it bears repeating: the bare minimum process that stops me from re-uploading with typo fixes is to save out the final images, go over them very slowly and deliberately, wait minimum eight hours (preferably sleep) and then do it again with fresh eyes. For people who don't already know what it's supposed to say, typos are buzzkills that take people out of the moment.

Get to know your favorite techniques for increasing readability. Alignment, character width, shading, color, positioning, spacing, these are all your friends. It cannot be overstated how important it is to find ways you like to give strong color contrast on character edges - a dark font on a light background or vice versa is the most basic technique and there's no shame in using it, but others can be found as well depending on what you think works best for the manip.

Increasing the line height from the font default is a ubiquitous practice in professional typesetting because it makes it easier to find the beginning of the next line in a paragraph. We captioners tend to work in thin columns so typically you want to deliberately avoid having a single word between a previous sentence and a line break, and typically avoid having a single word at the end of a paragraph. As the look of your text finalizes, if whitespace tweaks aren't cutting it, then don't be afraid to cut/amend/tweak the script if the content is almost identical but it reads easier as layed out.

I highly recommend <<www.dafont.com/|dafont>> as a font source, which lets you preview sample text of your choosing on a wide variety of free fonts - put an excerpt of your script where readability is a concern and try a preview on the "Tiny" setting. Lately if I don't immediately have a familiar font in mind then the first thing I do is browse there a little and install a new one.

NECRO!

How to do heart eyes in GIMP! I'm going to assume that you already have made an empty eye. If you don't know how, PomPom has a tutorial on this very thread! Just look at page two.

First, find an image of a heart. That should be pretty easy, they're all over the internet. Then, make a new layer in GIMP, and paste the image in there. Make sure it's the only layer visible, and that it's placed properly!

Now you'll have a heart with a big white background. In order to get rid of it, you should use fuzzy select. Now, you might be thinking, "Oh, I can just select the white part and delete that." The problem is that the heart will have a weird border around it, which looks terrible. So instead, fuzzy select the heart, cut it out, delete everything else in the layer, and paste it back in. Now you'll have a nice, pretty heart!

A nice, pretty heart that's probably way too big. So now, with the heart still selected, switch over to the scale tool and scale it down! I like to start with just the heart layer visible, then switch all the layers back on when it's a bit smaller. The scale tool will also let you move the heart around- use that to place it right where you want it. If you do all that, then you'll have an image with some pretty heart eyes~

I cast resurrect on the thread.

I'm hoping someone can point me toward a good tutorial for animating Kaa eyes?

I've found a couple of tutorials for a single expanding ring but nothing that would help me fill in colours.

Thanks in advance, folks.

I feel like the specific will depend on what you're using to animate.

If I had to animate that, I would just use shaders to make concentric circles (comparatively trivial if you know your way around) and stitch them into the image with Python and some masks made in GIMP or something like that.

Though your workflow of animating things is probably way different, so it would be easier to answer if you told people what software you're using, etc.

...And I *just* noticed I replied to a post from five years ago.