1. Be sure to get a DDS plugin for Photoshop: http://developer.nvidia.com/content...adobe-photoshop - be sure to grab correct version

I've noticed today that NVidia released a 64-bit version of DDS plugin, so you can use them with your 64-bit Photoshop.

2. Open Photoshop and create a new image. Press File --> New. The image should be 512x512 pixels and should be in RGB color mode.

3. Fill the background layer in black. Press Edit --> Fill, pick Black and set Opacity to 100%.

4. Add 2 new layers to the image. Press Layer --> New --> Layer and click OK in the dialog. Or press Ctrl+Shift+N and press OK in the dialog. You should have layers like this (layer tab):
o Layer 2
o Layer 1
o Background

5. Get a shape you want a tattoo from in photoshop brush file. For the tutorial I used a puppy image from this set http://sedma.deviantart.com/art/Fun...rushes-94298601

6. Go to the Layer 2, pick the brush tool and white color and draw your shape on layer 2.


7. Press Select --> Select all and Edit --> Copy merged. Go to Channels tab (by default it is located in the bottom right quarter of the screen, middle tab). Press the Add new channel button:

Your channels list should look like this:
o RGB
o Red
o Green
o Blue
o Alpha 1

8. The first 4 channels should be invisible (no eye icon on the left) and only the Alpha 1 channel should stay visible. Press Edit --> Paste. Press Ctrl+D to remove the selection.

9. Make the Alpha 1 channel invisible and the RGB channel visible (the Red, Green and Blue channel will be made visible automatically). Go back to Layers tab (by default it is located in the bottom left quarter of the screen, left tab).

10. Pick Layer 2 (the layer with the image in white) and press Ctrl+I. The image should disappear, but don't panic! It only turned to black.

11. Make the Background layer invisible and pick the Layer 1 from the layers tab. It should look like this:


12. Now you can use the three basic colors to color the image. Be sure to stay on Layer 1, so you don't have to care about borders. Basic colors can be found in Swatches tab (top right quarter if the screen, middle tab). 100% red is first, next is yellow, which is 50% red and 50% green, 100% green, cyan - 50% green and 50% blue, 100% blue, magneta - 50% blue and 50% red. You can use the 50% colors, but in CAS you can change only 4 (3 made by basic colors and 1 made by alpha channel) so other colors will be result of mixing those. The result should look like this:


Layer 1 alone will look similar to this:


13. Make the Background visible, go to Channels tab and make the Alpha 1 channel visible too. Check if Alpha fits the image. It should look like this:


If the Alpha channel does not fit the image in Step 7 you probably picked Copy instead of Copy merged and Photoshop centered the image for you.

14. If you're sure everything looks ok, press Layer --> Flatten image.

15. Press File --> Save as, type in name of your file and pick D3D/DDS format. (If you don't have it on the list you've probably installed the plugin in 64bit version of Photoshop.) Make sure everything looks like this:

and click "Save".

16. Open Tattooinator by CmarNYC . Type in your Tattoo name and press Select to get your DDS file. Enable all the channels, including Alpha and set colors for presets (I picked a red puppy with pink nose for you!).


Click the Preview Tattoo Image button. If anything went wrong you'll see it on the image.


17. If everything looks OK press Create Tattoo Package, name your package and press Save. To check your tattoo ingame move it to Mods/Packages folder.


note:
I didn't post many Photoshop menu images mostly because my Photoshop is in Polish and screenshots would be useless. If something is not clear enough please post and I'll make it simplier.

note2:
I am not familiar with other versions of Photoshop, co I can't help you guys asking where something can be.

This is really needed for Photoshop users! Thanks!

Sweet!! I'm so glad I found this post. I can FINALLY make decent tattoos for my sims! I don't have Ambitions, but I do have the patch that allows me to use tattoos in the base game. I'm assuming this will still work because I have that patch, but I could be wrong. I'll try it out and then post here with the answer once I make a tattoo I'm actually happy with.

Do you think we could get an example of a tattoo with the blended colours, so we have a basic idea of how to do that, or would that be a pain in the ass? I tried just winging it and figuring it out myself, but for some reason it's not working for me. When I use the default colors for the preview in Tattooinator, I get blue showing up where magenta and cyan are in the image, and green shows up where yellow is in the image. Red doesn't show up at all, and I have no color blending. Is it some silly thing that I'm overlooking?

About all I can tell you is that blending colors won't work as expected, but you may be able to get a pleasing result with some experimentation. The tattoos don't blend colors in the usual sense - red is layered on the skin color, green on top of that, blue on top of that, and alpha on top of everything. You're getting blue instead of magenta or cyan because the blue is replacing the red or green. Similarly you're getting green instead of yellow because the green replaces the red. The only way to get a blend is to use, say, a bright red and a pale green to get some shade of yellow.

In general it's better to stick with three-color or four-color tattoos.

It my Paint Shop Pro tutorial in the base of the tutorials forum, I make a tattoo with blended colors. For some reason, the tattoos I've made recently and then placed in game, disable 'Advanced' features for all tattoos, so once I have that bug worked out, I'll be back to making tattoos I suspect.

Here is the link since it fell to the second page:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=414778

Hi, I tried this photoshop tutorial with CS3, and it seems impossible to use the "Invert" tool (Ctrl+I) in 32 bit mode, so I don't know how you did!
It doesn't work for me

How do the steps work on photoshop 8 because I can't find a channel button anywhere.
(the snag is that I can't figure out how to create the alpha channel and the other channels.)

I have a question...im new to photoshop but i have Photoshop 5.0..soo im not sure what a channel tab is? can u explain please? i really wanna make custom tattoos for my sims x.x

Hey there!
I hope someone can help me with this, because I seriously can´t make any sense out of this. I already made some tattoos, but that was 1 1/2 years ago and I forgot how to do it...
This tutorial was really helpful, thanks a lot, but I seem to always crash into the same problem, as I try to create a completely one colored tattoo.
When I try to make a tattoo with PS CS5 (+DS Plugin) and the Tattooinator, the preview always shows me, that there is something wrong with it:


These are my layers:


And these my channels:


Seeing this, I tried several thing:
- saving with and without Mipmaps
- painting it in black and without any color
- having two layers, one with the tatto black, the other one underneath with the red tattoo
- changing the alpha channel to completely black or completely white
- enable or disbale the channels in the tattooinator

It doesn´t seem to make any difference (yes, I always reloaded or startet the tattooinator all over again).
I don´t understand why it keeps making these weird squared outlines around my tattoo and why it always has the color of the B channel.

Can somebody please explain this to me? I already searched for an answer but couldn´t find one...

Did you ever get an answer to this? I'm having the same issue!

Sorry I didn't see this before!

According to the screengrab from Photoshop, the red channel appears to be blank. More important, the screenshot from Tattooinator show only the Alpha channel enabled. You can't do that, and I think in the latest version of Tattooinator it won't let you do that. The channels have to be enabled in order: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha. If you skip a channel you get unexpected results.

Omg I've never used this before, but after following the photoshop Tutorial it worked you've both made me happy Thank you.

I'm not sure if it's okay to resurrect this, but I figured since it was a tutorial it might be fine. Unfortunately, when it comes to art tutorials, I'm a visual learner and all of the tutorial images are no longer showing on here. I've looked around for other tutorials, but can't find any as detailed as this one seemed to be. The only other ones I found and tried to follow, I still can't get the Tatooinator to work right with, because they all end up with the tattoo I'm trying to make surrounded by a colored square box. Even if the image I'm working with is the only thing on the alpha layer.

Is there anyone who can add the photos back to this tutorial? I, and perhaps others who are also looking for a good tattoo tutorial, would really appreciate it.

Unfortunately, the images haven't been cached by the wayback machine and the creator of this tutorial hasn't been online in some years. Those pictures are gone for good.

But if you'd like to upload your .dds and/or the .psd file of your work (probably on google drive, as the MTS uploader doesn't like dds files in my experience), I'd gladly take a look at it. Not a tattoo creator myself, but an advanced Photoshop user. Hopefully I may be able to spot what's missing and add some images of my own