Photoshop

If you want to be legal, go with Photoshop Elements - think you can get it straight from Adobe.com. It's a stripped down home-user version. Should still be good enough.
Then buy a book on how to use it - if you'r enot used to Photoshop, you might find it illogical - a book will fix this.

However, if you want to do decals and more "line graphics", then a vector based application could be a better choice. Photoshop does this to a certain degree too, but its primary focus is photos/pictures, not logos, typography, etc.

Cheers, so what application would you suggest Jocke?

For vector stuff, I don't really know anymore. I used to get along with Freehand quite a lot, but that must now be almost 10 years since I last used it "properly". I'm also completely out of what's happening on the PC software scene. I've also used Fireworks, but that's more for web-graphics.

Photoshop should still be able to do it, it's just that it's not really built for it.

Corel Draw used to be quite sweet, about 20 years ago.

I guess just do a search for vector graphics software?! What you want to be able to do is, to create a box, and it remains a box, not pixels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics_editor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

If you have it all in vectors, then you can export it to an EPS or something which would allow the company that does the decals to cut them out with perfect precision (as there's no degradation in scaling).

Thanks for the tips guys

Ok im no designer as you can see this is just so I can give the graphics/vinyl place an idea of what I want.

Basically I have an 07 larger tank but to cover up some of the peeling paint it either needs to be resprayed or vinyl, spoke to LR designs who have done loads of the battle bikes and its 1/3 cheaper than paint.

A bit of scanner work, and MS paint has come up with this:

The grey parts are the bare black tank:


Plain white:


Blue going into white:


I think I like the bottom on best?

Once a template is made any one can buy one.....lol

Dan,

Just did this in about 4 minutes.

D

Goggled "Dapper Dan", got the image, turned it into a Jpeg, got an image of Superduke, dragged the Dapper file onto the layers, covered the Superduke logo on the bike file with a grey layer, made the upper half of Dapper logo about 60% transparent, made the lower half about 20% transparent. Job done. 4 minutes. It's a bit crude though, if you took 40 minutes it could look photorealistic.

Get Photoshop and go for it. Looking at your posts you do this quite a bit. You'll enjoy it - designing the way your bike looks.

Downloaded photoshop 3 earlier but as previously said by Jocke need to learn how to use it

What you have done is cool though

http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/start/start.htm

Then...
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=h ... 8186c698b6

Go for it!

Cheers