20% Time 2/7/08

Well this week I had very interesting time looking up some things to learn.  At first I did not think I was going to get anything, but finally, I stumbled onto, not one, but two tutorials.  The first one I found is actually an animation (it’s a curve that has a moving shine).  And the second, if you are not familiar with some techniques photographers use, will blow your mind.

The animation actually came out really well, I think, and the best part is that it is not a hard technique (that is always a plus).  The original tutorial was by Elie El Khoury, found on tutorialized.com.  So first, get an appropriate canvas size and put black in the background, and a dark color into the fore.  Then, render some clouds and get the pen tool out.  Go ahead and draw a free form line (four anchor points works good) with the pen with the paths option selected (up at the top) and get a new layer.  Once on the new layer, get a 4 pixel brush.  Now, this was one new part to me -when selecting the brush, there should be a little tab “brushes” by the upper  right (If not, just go to ‘window-brushes’)  Then once there, you can totally customize your brush.  In this instance, you need to go to “shape dynamics” and place the selection to “pen pressure” - this is important.

Next, get the pen again with white in the foreground and right click on the pen’s path.  Now go down to where it says “stroke path” and set it up for “brush” and ”simulate pressure”.  There should be a streak of white along where you made your curve with the pen earlier.  After that, make another layer and repeat those steps, just with a 5 pixel brush.  If you did it correctly, the streak will become a brighter white.  Then, create an outer glow on the second layer using the brightest form of the dark color that you used, and also a 20% color overlay.  After that, deselect the little eye next to the third layer (on the layers palette) and jump to image ready.

The last few steps to this tutorial are fairly simple.  Just select the third layer and make a mask (a little rectangle icon with a circle inside at the bottom of the layers palette).  Then, use the airbrush to get rid of the visible third layer.  Then, deselect the little link icon in the palette and change your brush to white.  Finally, go to the farthest side of the canvas and draw a vertical line.  You will only see it on the palette.

FINAL STEP: Copy the layer down in the animation window.  Then just use the selection tool to move the line all the way to the other side of the page.  Here is the coolest part: use the tweens button at the bottom to create 50, or so, slides that use only the position of all layers.  From here, you can use whatever time settings you like and you have it.

I think it has a little bit of an aurora borealis in it, no?

I also happened to mention earlier that I found something else that would blow your mind, here it is.  I found out, in a tutorial by Denny Tang, that those dramatic photos you see of hobos and old people are actually photo-shopped using the plastic wrap filter to accentuate the wrinkles and darken the picture!  I would have posted my results, but I could not attain any decent close-up photos.  Until next time…