I'll preface the little I can offer with this: I know nothing of photoshop. I use GIMP in Linux, and my knowledge is pretty rudimentary, at best. There is a steep learning curve and I don't find it very intuitive for newbies or infrequent/casual users, of which I am both. Also, she is going to have to do a LOT of online searches. Youtube videos will help a lot. The problem I ran into is what I thought was a good key word to use for search, the digital artistic world didn't and used different words. Meh. The entire thing will be very labor intensive and time intensive. So no, I never did find any instructions. I had to find my own way and did not do that great of a job of it.
As to stretching, the original capes themselves intentionally were made to stretch as to create the shape and pattern of the folds. No way around that. I found three ways to handle it:
1. Avoid any images that would go into the center of the cape and just do images/designs that border the cape using the edges and bottom.
2. Make the image approximately twice as wide as it is long. This will take a ton of trial and error to get the proportions right.
3. Pick an image that still looks good when it's stretched.
Making folds on the image: (again, all of this will require a lot of trial and error practice and is very time consuming)
1. Make a layer to go on top of the cape that is semi-opaque so you can still see the folds through it.
2. Use shading options: the higher ridges of the folds highlighted in a lighter color than the main cape color, and the deeper valleys a darker shade.
Some basic instructions for GIMP customs:
Open Gimp and then open with the item you want to make a custom (I suggest you make a copy of it with a different name so you don't ruin the original)
Gimp will ask you if you want to open mipmaps as well.
Do NOT open mipmaps!!!
You need to create a new layer to add your image. This layer is where you will work on your new image.
Make sure you MERGE all layers (new and original file) before saving.
Once you have merged all your layers into 1 single layer, make sure you right click the layer in the layers window, and select 'Layer to image size.' This will crop any part of the layer that extends past the image dimensions to the right size. If you have part of the layer extending past the image edge, the custom will appear blank white.
When you are done, it is time to save it.
However, you have to choose EXPORT file (NOT "save"), to your Documents/Eternal Lands/custom/player/your_toon_name/meshes/ folder
First it will ask you if you want to overwrite, you choose yes.
Than another panel appears where you set compression: none.
Next, on the same panel you HAVE TO choose to generate mipmaps; this is important since not all people have latest graphic card, or they use Poor Man settings, and in this case EL will use those generated mipmaps.
Now you can make a folder to see this locally (which means only the person doing this can see it for now). You will need to create a path, no idea what the windows path would be but mine in Linux is ~/.elc/updates/1_9_6/custom/player/your_player-name/meshes/name_of_item.dds
*Note* you need to make sure you use the same exact name as the original item you are customizing, and rename the original item to something like original_cape1_green.dds
Final result should be approximately 25kb in size, dxt1, and mipmap 1:8
I found this link helpful as well:
From: https://journalxtra.com/gimp/how-to-make-a-semi-transparent-image-using-gimp/
