How to: Ghost, Soul & Spirit Effects 1 (Pixiv Fanbox)

I've been asked a few times how I did X or what I did to achieve Y. To save myself some effort by explaining each time or remind myself my future self how i did a certain thing if i happen to forget, I figured I'd write some how to guides for the various after-edit effects I make and share them. I don't plan to lock these behind a tier because, personally, I'd rather see people make more TSF content and limiting access wouldn't help that. If there's something you would like to see a guide on, comment below and I'll try to explain it with a guide.

First off, I'll start with the basic method of doing a Ghost, Soul and Spirit effect. The basic effect is very easy, but it gets more complex if you want to do something special.

Basic Advanced

Basic Method

A quick and easy method of achieving a basic ghost overlay for a character in a scene.

Make your scene

First, make your scene in Chara Studio or whatever program you wish to use. Know which character you want to be a ghost, and what characters you want to be oblivious.

Prep work

Take two different screenshots of the same scene, one with everyone and one without the character(s) you want in ghost form. This is all you need for a basic effect.

Into the editing software

Take the screenshot without your ghost character into any good editing software, e.g. Photoshop, Gimp, etc. If it can support layers, it'll work.

Once open in your editing software, place the screenshot with your ghost character on top, ensuring it's the top layer in your layer menu. (shown bottom right)

Reduce the opacity of the top layer to an amount your you are happy with. This now creates your ghost effect. Anything else different in your top layer to your bottom layer will also be affected by the lowered opacity so ensure theres nothing else different in your two screenshots. You can erase it but save yourself some effort before that point.

If you have any issues you wish to fix with your character, such as my character's tie clipping problem. Make sure you do it before adjusting the opacity as, depending on how you do it, doing so afterwards can have problematic results.

And that's it for the basic method. This method doesn't allow any complex editing because there's more to the top layer than just your character, but for the basic effect, this achieves it quickly and easily. A guide to the more advanced editing can be found here https://kawaii-tsunaho.fanbox.cc/posts/4724933 .

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