Many of you who lurk on the various Lycos TG Caption Clubs have probably thought about doing some of your own, but were a little too reluctant to try it for one reason or another.
This is a simple tutorial for creating captions which might help. I will try to explain everything you know to get started, and the rest will just be up to your creativity and kinky mind.
If you can afford it, the best tool in the universe for image editing is Adobe Photoshop on a Mac or Windows PC. The next best thing is called GIMP ("GNU Image Manipulation Program"). It's a totally free image editor that works on almost all platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) and does most of what Photoshop can do. You can download GIMP from www.gimp.org
There are lots of ways you can go about finding pictures of pretty girls. One of the first places you might want to try is Google Image Search. Another option would be to browse through online catalogs, like Victoria's Secret. Once you find an image you like, copy it to your computer. On a Windows PC, you would do this by right-clicking on the image and selecting the option to download the image. On a Mac, you can also just drag the picture from the browser window to your desktop. Here is one that I found, which I shall use for this demonstration:
I find that an image that is 500 pixels tall by 600 pixels wide is ideal, so I'm going to resize this picture to be 500 pixels tall, while preserving the relative width. This will allow me to fit it into a 500x600 space with extra room on the side for text. (I use 500x600 because it's large enough to look nice and be easy to read, while small enough to fit inside most browser windows. If your image is too big, people will not be able to see the whole picture at once.) Most web graphics use a standard of 72 pixels per inch. If it is set on a different resolution, this would be a good time to change that as well. I'm not going to do much to alter this image, but I will crop a little off the sides, to make more room for text.
Okay, now I need to creat a new blank image, 500 pixels by 600 pixels.
This part is easy enough. Copy the image and paste it into your new background.
That white backdrop is boring, so I will use Photoshop's eye-dropper tool to select a shade of pink from the girl's top, and use the fill tool to dump that color into the background area. As you get better at image manipulation, you might start doing fancier things, but this is a good start.
Using the text tool, I select the area I want my caption to go (the blank space we just created, leaving a little bit of space on the margins), select a font I like (I'm adicted to Comic Sans MS), and start writing. I like to draw my inspiration from the picture, especially the look on the model's face. In this picture, she looks like she is not enjoying herself at all, so I wrote a caption that suits the mood. Not my most creative one ever, but this is just a demo.
This step is important. Most image editors paste things in "layers", sort of like the way cartoons are made with overlapping cels. When we pasted the photo into our blank, that added a layer, and the text went in as another layer. This is a good thing, because it lets you edit different elements of your work separately. For example, I could nudge the text up or down a little bit if I wanted, without moving the whole image.
However, JPEG and GIF standards don't support layers, so we need to "Flatten" the image into a single layer before we can save it in a format that can be put out on the web. In Photoshop, "Flatten Image" can be found near the bottom of the "Layers" menu.
The format you will want to save this image in is JPEG (which has a ".jpg" after the file name). The "GIF" format uses up less space, but has a limited color pallate, so it's not as good for photographic images.
That's all there is to it! You have now created a new caption, and are ready to upload it to your favorite Lycos club. Feel free to send me an e-mail any time if you have questions or want to give me any feedback about this page.