-Basic skinning 101-

Setting up this guide...

1. Let's give this guy some basic pants shall we? Just highlight the pants area and refer back to the anatomy map to be sure. It's best to get use to the various highlight selection tools. Try using the Lasso, Square Marquee, and Select Inverse and find which is easiest for you to use now because it will save you alot of editing time later.

2. Basic nude is way out this season, so let's give him some classic blue jeans to give him the tough urban look. Try using Variations, Color Scale, or making a new blue layer then changing the opacity. The straight Fill tool will wash out the fine details so we are going to stay away from that.

3. Feeling quite intimidated by naked torsos, we are going to slap a shirt on our pre-fabricated hero. Use selection tools like you did when you highlighted the pants.

4. The easies way to get a basic white when skinning is to Desaturate then adjust the Brightness/Contrast of the selected area.

5. We are going to give our hero some personality now by making him the leader of the Dot.Com gang. Gang colors are a solid black dot on the back of all gang shirts (lame i know...). Highlight a circle with the Circle Marquee tool (hold down shift to keep it perfect). Make sure you remeber how the skin is symetical and will mirror duplicate.

6. Now is the time to use the Fill tool, just drop the black bucket into the selected area and *BAM* kick it up a notch!

7. The fateful moment has arrived...time to test the skin. Start up Soldier of Fortune multiplayer and view the skin. If all is well, start a server and give the skin its final run. The easiest way when you are by yourself is to kill yourself and then check out the dead body.

How does it look? Think you can do better? Well punk...try it and see. Wanna add all of the kewl shit like boltons and stuff like that? Well you are just going to have to wait for the SkinLab Advanced Skinning Guide...so there!