I am working on my first fan-fiction, just for fun. The ship in my story is an Excelsior-refit type like the U.S.S. Lakota from DS9 "Paradise Lost". Just for fun I created some cover art. I am not good at photo editing, but I have some photo's I found online of the Lakota model from the Christie's auction. I want to turn everything but the ship black. I have been using a black bush and progressively reducing the size of the brush as I blow it up. I tried to use the paint bucket, but sometimes it goes into the parts I don't want it to. I downloaded GIMP, but I am new to it and I find it easier to use Irfanview. Is there an easier way to cut out the ship? I want to do it to several images and use them as cover art for each of the follow up stories. I also want to change the name and registry number of the ship and I have downloaded fonts that look right. Any tips would be appreciated.
I know how I would do it in Photoshop, But GIMP makes me want to eat a gun so I might not be able to help you. But, in PS, I would isolate the ship using probably the pen tool, or the lasso tool if you're not comfortable with the pen. Then I would copy just ship and make it as a new layer and then paste that onto whatever background you have in mind. As for the lettering, I would type the regestry and then individually cut and paste the characters into an arc (there is a tool to place letters on an arc in PS already, but I don't use it for registries as it distorts the whole letter into an arc, where as starship lettering is supposed to be normally proportioned digits that are arranged in the arc form.) Then, I would take that layer of just the letters and use the various Transform tools to distort it so it looks right on the hull. Hope that helps! --Alex