20% Time 6/2/08

The school year is almost over!  Just one more week, then finals, and we are through.  Woohoo!

Anyway, this week I decided to try some more effects with blurring.  I found one tutorial for Gimp on tutorialized, but you can do the exact same thing with photoshop.  Actually, the overall effect turned out to be really similar to the exploding planet picture from way back a few months ago.  (New tuts are so hard to find, the only thing I really need is some new vectors to use, but again, very hard to find becasue the world runs on CS3 nowadays).  On the plus side though, the effect is still quite different and striking, and as soon as you see it, you will probably recognize it.  It is all generated on the computer, no pictures were edited, so it looks alot like some of my earlier posts, kind of reinicesent-y.

So, I started off with a text layer “aero nova tech”.  It is an inside joke; I know a guy who is trying to upstart a kind of backyard buisness with this name and uses any and every opportunity at school to advertise.  So I was thinking that alot of graphis design has to do with advertisement and that this would be an interesting little ‘hats off’ to this “company”. 

After that, I had a blackbackground put in and I duplicated the text.  After I had combined one of the duplicates with the background, I applied a polar coordinates filter to the image to unpolarize it across the top of the screen.  Then after rotating the picture, I applied some wind to the text, both left and right.  Then after repolarizing it back to how it was before, plus all of the rays that are now coming off of it, I had to actually do two motion blur filters with the zoom setting centered around the “o” in order to clarify the wind edges and amplify it a bit.

Then I took the original text layer and duplicated it one more time and expanded it by two pixels, blured it by 10 pixels, and set it to screen and placed it under the original text layer also.  Then, I changed the text to black so that it stands out and changed the color balance of the rays in the background.  This was the end result:

20% Time 5/20/08

Well, this week was interesting.  All my teachers decided to give out projects at the exact same time, and of course, who doesn’t enjoy the thrill of procrastination?  Anyway, this week, I decided to try out that seemingly popular style of picture known as the montage…(I think).  Basically, you start off by picking a style (retro with old ads, posters and faded colors; grunge with big spatters, rock equipment -that is kind of optional depending on what you are doing, and dark colors; or even urban with 3D stars, drippy clouds and circles, bars, and cityscape stuff- ex: buildings, graffiti, chain fences, and all that good stuff.  If you look around, that style is getting very popular.  The only problem with this is that it takes a great deal of time and creativity to prep a really nice piece.

Since I have no stash of picture clips or even one piece of ‘urban’ clip art to my name, I went to a website I found on Delicious called Design Bum by issara.  I perused around and decided that I really liked most of his work, especially since he wants to help out the design community and put up everything for download.  Now, I was just going to get the pieces called layered 1 and 2, but then I saw a button off on the side that said: “Download all Downloads”.   Ooooooh!  Needless to say, it was a 233 MB zip file (it contained within it about 20 other zip files).  I have entire programs on my flash-drive that take up less memory than that!

Anyway, I got everything set up to get going, and had no idea what to do.  I did not just want to copy the whole picture, all that cropping and composing takes time (believe me, I know that now), so looked up some tuts.  (By the way, when I opened the layered retro montages, they were about 150 layers each and took about a minute just to open up on my computer, forget about the time it takes to switch between windows).  I found a tutorial by SGlider12 right away that really set the base for my picture.   For it, I had to open up The Gimp (yes, this program takes up less space than the pictures it can produce) as well as an old picture of me with a hat that I liked.  Then, I tried to different color settings.  The first was a low color threshold, another was a lighter color threshold.  I saved both as jpegs and then used Photoshop to take the parts that I liked from both and merged the layers.  After setting the layer to darken, the white all disappeared and I was free to make a background color.  I ended up choosing a dull blue that would contrast nice with the yellows and reds that I had from the downloaded montages.

This effect is actually getting very, very popular, so it would do me good to keep working on it.  See if you can tell which parts of each I used in the final image.

That was the first part.  Next, since there were so many layers, I set my cursor to automatically select any layers I clicked on and just threw those pictures all around to dig for neat little clips.  Whenever something caught my eye, I dragged it out, and arranged it on my canvas.  For the most part, everything fit and only a few things needed cropping (such as the large brown newspaper up top that originally covered the whole thing, and the torn paper at the bottom that covered the picture too much).  Despite all this, I feel that it came out really nice, with its little newspapers, numbers, ads, and those weird pipe/machinery fixtures around the edges- you’ll know what I am talking about in a second.  Granted, it is not as filled and busy as the professional montages, but it still carries a cool spirit.

20% Time 5/20/08

Well, my parents anniversary party was this weekend (it went well by the way) and I ended up emailing a picture of my parents that I had cleaned up, not the same as what I had posted, to be enlarged and printed on a canvas.  I finally got a chance today for a chance to even get near a computer.  As a result, I am going to be posting an old picture I generated on photo-shop.

I found the image on tutorializedthat ended up having a very cool result.  It looks like a star scape with nebula in the foreground.  Just start off a black background and add noise for the stars.  Now, one thing I liked about how the tut is that it explains that because the noise particles are so small that it looks really weird, so if you enlarge the background image a bit, the spaces and the ’stars’ get bigger.  Then, I made a new layer and chose a background color for the cloud filter.  After that, apply the filter until you get a layout that you really like.  Then, just adjust the blending mode until the size and opacity levels that are desired are reached.  However, that is only one color.  For additional colors, you need to make a new layer, apply another cloud filter and then alt+click the triangle that controls the blending amounts to divide it into two smaller triangles and then drag the right one as far down as you like.  This blends the one color into only the space of the other color so all the clouds are coherent.  The blending effects are very powerful, but also very complicated to understand because of it.  Finally, add some blurred circles for really bright stars and you are done.

This is the end result:

20% Time 5/12/08

This week is a little different because of my hectic schedule.  During Tuesday, I had to take my AP Environmental Science test and wasn’t able to spend the normal amount of my time looking up new tutorials.  However, since I have been looking into several open source programs from the open disc.  The one in particular that I have been really interested in is a 3D animation program called Blender.

I have actually found plenty of very interesting tutorials on my usual haunt: tutorialized.  I was originally going to post an actual animation, but my video card can’t handle the game engine on blender (you use that for physics, like domino stuff).  Then, I tried an animation using key frames.  I just had a simple take off and landing of a rocket using a cone, cylinder, and particle emitting planes (particles are really fun with key frames).  In the modeling area (just the usual 3d editing screen without the actual render, just shapes) it looked ok, but it took to long to render and position the ‘camera’ to fit the whole thing in.  So I tried to take a screen-cast of the modeling animation itself, but my RAM gave out. 

Here I just rendered a specific frame, the default background is sky blue.

Finally, I gave up on the entire idea of being able to upload a video and switched over to jpegs.  I found another tutorial by super3boy that showed you how to make grass.  It was actually really easy.  Just start off with a plane, add particles, and change to static.  From there, just apply the amounts to determine the height, and direction of the blades.  Then by copying and rotating a couple times.  Finally, make one final plane and turn it brown, along with the previous to green.

The outcome is really cool for the amount of time it takes.

20% Time 5/5/08

Since I am slowly finding out that the amount of new stuff that I can actually learn online is becoming more and more restricted as the weeks pass, I have become more and more challenged to think of things that I can do.  Fortunately, this month is my parents anniversary and I have been chosen for several projects dealing with getting everything ready.  So, the first thing I wanted to do was actually to try restoring some of their wedding pictures from 35 years ago.

The first thing I realized on Tuesday is that either no freelancers know how to restore pictures, or those that actually know don’t really want to give out ‘trade secrets’ or something like that.  I did not enter any forums for fear of being deemed snoopy or unsportsmanlike etc.  Fortunately for me, my brother actually used to work for OCB and used to actually do restorations quite often.  Now, when I say restoration, I do not mean colorizing black and white pictures, I mean putting colors back into aging photos that are turning sepia and getting speckled.  So I quizzed him and pretty much found out that “Levels are your friend”.  By getting the scanning the picture, opening it up, and then redistributing the levels to balance the colors, the picture will regain nearly all of the original color.

For the first picture, I did all this but still needed to do some selective stuff.  First, the hand on my dad was way too pale and I had to go use the lasso tool and a color balance layer to match it to the rest of him.  Then, the shoulder on his suit was too light compared to the rest of it.  On the next picture, I had to repeat the first process, then had to go and actually adjust all the background shadows in order to see my parents a bit better.  Then, I finished the photos up by taking the clone stamp tool at about ten pixels and cleaned up any really grainy areas, or smudges, scratches, etc.  I probably spent about an hour for both, the techniques are really easy.  From here, I might use them for invitations, email them to my brothers for prints, or whatever. 

Click for a closer view…

For future entries, I might be experimenting on Blend…