20% Time 2/11/08
This week, I had a little bit of trouble trying to find a good tutorial. I was afraid that I might have to go back to some of my B.B. (Before Blog) work. Luckily however, I finally found a tutorial by cute.ninza at photoshoptalent that actually scored a 9.29 out of 10. So I could not pass up this chance to see a good quality piece and quickly went through it. It was actually very clear and easy to follow, but I still messed up in some places.
On step 4, instead of getting a smooth, silvery water look, I always ended up with something that looked like Venom from Spider-man. I just found out that I kept getting the following image because in channels, the image is always in gray-scale. I might look into some more effects that you can do with this shape, because it in itself is quite interesting.
cc some rights reserved “coral reef” by Sam and Ian
First, I found a picture of a reef on creative commons and slowly masked off the background and some fish. Then, on a new layer, got a dark blue/black gradient. Then by going to the channels tab on the layer palette and making a new channel, make some difference clouds and drag them a little higher than halfway up the page and using a really soft edged brush to smooth out the bottom. Then you do that one more time, but go to sketch-chrome and put in low detail, high smoothness to get a silvery water look. However, since I could not do it correctly, I had to use a white brush and then chrome it over.
Then, I just made a new layer, and ctrl-clicked on the first new channel (alpha 1) and filled in the selection with white, set the blending to overlay, and reduced the opacity a little. After that, do the same thing with alpha 2, just reduce the opacity a little more. Then just get a large soft white brush and get a large circle of “light” at the top. Then, I just got another layer with the alpha one selection and painted white, and zoom blurred it at 100%. This gives you a ray effect. Finally, you can move the light behind the water (and reduce the opacity if you have to).
The last step of the tutorial I did not really think would work right, but I did it any why just to try. Open a new document and get a black background with a lens flare (on a separate layer) in the center. Transform the flare (ctrl-T) to squish it into a oval and then change the blending to lighten. I then duplicate it and rotate to make a symmetrical 8-point star, flatten it (ctrl-shift-E), and enlarge it to fill the whole canvas. The last things you have to do are to use wave (at 155 generators, wavelengths between 752-794, amplitude 6-34, and set to wrap around. Then copy the layer twice and twirl one layer 354 degrees and the other -354 with the blending mode to lighten on both. Then just merge again, desaturate and use auto-levels to brighten the picture.
This is just for some artistic rays in the water. Just take the image you just made and drag it to the ocean picture form before. Then just position it the way you want and mask off any parts you don’t want to show. Then I set the reef picture to the top, copied the rays and set those to the top and masked it again.
Overall, I thought it was a neat picture, but it just took me too long. I need to find something simpler next time.
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