20% Time 3/18/08

I was on photoshop talent again this week, but I was not looking for a competition.  Instead, I was trying to find some of those ‘effects’ tutorials that always look so cool on their site.  With little trouble, I found one that one that can really come handy for portraits or pictures that have a need to emphasize a certain object.  The overall look looks really impressive and colorful, but it uses slightly strange steps to achieve that look and I never would have thought of that in my own.

2(26) and butterfly7 by joesbirds from Pbase

To set up the photo for manipulation, I had to spend a little bit of time cutting out the focal point for my two pictures.  Actually, I had to get the photos first- and since the material I was working with dealt with animals, I went to one source I could count on for color and animals, my brother’s photos that he has posted at Pbase.  They are not creative commons, but he gave me permission to use his pictures (technically, that makes it “exclusive”, cool!)

What ended up happening in the “From parrot to cool background” tutorial  by vohyndrais that you take a simple picture of a bird (I ended up using a bird for practice and a butterfly for another look) and then warp it several times using distort: wave/twirl.  Also, one thing I learned through this tutorial is that by typing ctrl-shift-F, you can change the opacity of an effect allowing both the unfiltered image and the distorted image to be shown and interesting shapes are the end result. 

Also, by increasing the saturation of the coloration of the distorted picture, underlying colors that are not easily seen (without zooming in to see the actual pixels) are brought out and even the most color lacking picture gets large amounts of bright, complementary colors surrounding it.  Overall, I ended up liking the tutorial picture better, but only because the coloration of blue and green.  The effect is still really cool.

20% Time 3/17/08

This week, I decided to take a little break from photo-manipulation.  The reason for this is because I need to take time to learn one of the most basic elements any person will absolutely have to know for graphic design: the pen tool.  I have used it sparingly before, trying to focus on effects, but I need to try it out some more.  Also, I am going to have to take the advice of my peers on photoshop talent and focus on small details and perspective.

So, the first thing to tackle is the pen tool, and just free hand drawing in general, and the best place to draw is on Illustrator.  So I looked up some tutorials to try to create a very common object in graphic design- an advertisement/pamphlet (Note: no perspective needed, just depth.  The difference is one has a vanishing point, the other has shadows). 

The first thing I made was a flower that was actually very easy.  I just took the polygon tool, and set it to ten sides, a decagon, and set the size.  Then by adding a ‘pucker bloat’ effect and rough edge creates an uneven, natural petal look.  Then Just applying the gradient.  The next thing to do was create two more smaller petal levels by using pentadecagon (it is also called a pentakaidecagon) and using the tweak effect instead of pucker and it will move the ‘petals’ into each other to give it a more natural look.  The last level of petals called for a small circle and ‘zigzag’ it with 20 ridges and the use rough edges on it as well.  The end result:

Then, I tried to recreate a picture from a tutorial that I found by TripleTee.  I say recreate because after trying to make the picture, I quickly discovered that even though the tutorial was labeled as ‘beginner’, the author must be using a tablet, or I have a really big handicap because of my ‘marble’ mouse.  Unlike conventional optical, or even track ball mouses that move according to the way you push it, a marble mouse is guided by a big red ball that you move with you fingers:

cc “Logitech Marble Mouse Optical Trackball” by Saxguy

So, my main problem was the pencil tool.  For that, you must click and drag to make a completely free-form line.  As you can see, that is the one thing this mouse is not made for.  However, I just toned down the opacity to be able to hide some of the blemishes.  The rest of it, though, was fairly easy with the pen tool.  I followed the tutorial with all the shapes and the overall setting, but the author kept using the pencil tool, so I just had to ignore him.  After that, I added some text (I turned it into an invitation so I can use it again later) along with some lines and the “tropical” logo symbol.  Then I just arranged some flowers with varied opacity across the page.  I thought the outcome was pretty good.

(The file doesn’t upload correctly, see it here.  I was having problems uploading pictures to Flickr, but now I have to go and flag each photo myself to mark it as safe in order to allow it to be seen without being signed in.)

Multi-Touch Computing

I saw this video this week by TEDtalks presented by Jeff Han.  Overall, I thought it was a  really cool idea to be able to have multiple touch points on the computer screen with very few bad points.  The whole concept of this computing interaction is to be able to take out all the hassles of point and click with a mouse and replace it with real-time, natural interaction with the objects on screen with as little need for an interface as possible.

First off, the ability to manipulate photos on screen with your hands is a very good idea.  The first thing I thought of for this were the implications it could possibly have for photoshop.  Even though Han said that there would be no real interface, Adobe could work out a system to create that interface to make be able to change between tools (like now, only now it will be ‘on demand’).  This would make it so that tablets (it’s just a touch screen without the screen) would not have to be in use anymore, they are a little expensive for their small size.  A five inch tablet (the smallest size) could cost as little as a hundred dollars.  If you see my next 20% time post you will see why anything with the pencil tool is difficult without a tablet.  The idea about satellite imaging was intriguing too.

 cc “tablet 1” by Randall Bennett

Next, I enjoyed the concept for integrating it into business.  Most everyone has thought about having automated order/serving machines from the auto-man to “Back to the Future”.  Yet, I had no idea that the technology was actually that close to production.  Microsoft has already started fine tuning their Microsoft Surface computer.  I really like this because it has the programing to recognize objects and wirelessly transfer information.  Such things like these will make things quite interesting in the decades to come.

The only thing I do not like is that because it is still so new, and apparently the company is having difficulty launching their product, that there are going to be huge amounts of glitches in the system for (in my opinion) several versions down the line.  Hopefully, they can work to prevent that.

20% Time 3/9/08

This week I decided to try out another competition at photoshop talent (it is only my second one).  When I got there, I had to chose from the multiple contests that were active this particular week.  I decided to choose a themed contest from the ‘all levels’ catagory called food landscapes.  ’All levels’ simplymeans that anyone belonging to the site, whether new (like me) or an old pro, can participate.  A themed contest means that the site supplies some pictures, you can use some of your own too, and you must create a new picture out of the original ones that pertains to the goal provided for that particular contest (and follow the rules or face the consequenses of a low score!). 

This particular one asked for a landscape made entirely out of food, and the prize was filter forge-a plugin for photoshop that allows the user to create their own filters, and acsess to the filters of other users as well.  I just could not resist.

So,  I downloaded all the fruit pictures that they provided and went to work scaling them down, and editing out the parts that I could potentially want from each picture.  After I did all that work , I deleted any layers that I realized could not be worked into my end result.  I ended up keeping a grape, a peach, a banana peel, a kiwi slice, a watermelon, a pinapple, and raspberries.  The site always uses massively high resolution for their pictures, and these pictures here are much smaller than the ones that I used.  What do you think I could do with them?  I did not even know yet.

So I went to flickr cc to randomly look for pictures that I could download for my picture to push my ideas toward some kind of unification.  Then I found the soup.  It was a french onion soup that had a lot of substance and color to it.  I finally had my base. 

 cc “French Onion Soup” by ilmingo

I decided to do a beach theme, with a little house inspired by another entry that I saw that used crackers and chocolate to create a really awesome little home.  The only difference was that I did not have a lot of time to go and create a ton of detail, so a got a ‘pre-made’ gingerbread house.

  cc “Gingerbread House” by flyingpurplemonkey

I began by taking the soup out of it’s bowl and copying it several times over to create a solid bottom to my picture that had a natural, sand and rocks feel to it.  I added a gradient background of different shades of blue to be the sky.  I cut out the house and placed it into the corner and added a shadow.  I then took the kiwi and turned it yellow and placed it at the top to be the sun.  I took one raspberry and changed it white, duplicated it and arranged them to serve as clouds.  Next, I noticede that the banana peel had ridges in it and could look like wood if worked with, so a took off one side of the peel and duplicatd it a couple times, made a little chair and “painted” it a green color.  Finally, I took one grape and colored the entire grape orange.  Then took two of the ‘panels’ of the fruit and colored each one different, one purple and one green to make a beach ball.

It was at this point that I realized that my picture looked empty.  All the other ones had crammed all kinds of stuff into theirs, so I wanted to include some more pictures.  I resized the picture to be longer (just by a little) and cut off part of the floor layer to make room for water.

 cc “wham:a different corner” by

From there, I created an island out of a watermelon out in the middle of the sea.  Then I took the peach, sut it into half along the natural indentation on the fruit, and stretched each side into a different shape and arranged them to look like palm branches.  My last picture used was a pinapple that I just stretched out to make a trunk.  It was here that because of my time limit ( I would be late if I waited until the next day and it was already late at night) I did not try to do it the ‘right way’ and use the pinnaple as a pattern and fill a predrawn vector (a shape) and fill it with the pattern.  I totally spaced out how to do that, I will have to find it again.  My last step was just going back and using the burn tool to get all the areas that needed any shading.  And then I was done.

I ranked 33 out of 34. (I will find out by Monday.)

20% Time 3/3/08

This week, I went back to snowdrip and used two tutorials that I found: one on lightning and one on spheres.  I knew that I wanted to combine them, but I did not really know how.  Then I found a picture on flickr that helped to draw on not only what I am learning, but an old tutorial that I have never posted that creates an object that is like a sort-of plasma ball.  All together it was like some sort of insane factory.  You will see what I mean in a minute.

First, I started off with the flickr picture of a conveyor belt.  I used the burn tool to darken some of the glare that was being reflected all over and decided to leave the people in the background to leave it more realistic looking.

cc “T4 Baggage Claim Conveyor Belt” by markhillary

Then I decided to add the lightning.  I was actually a lot easier than most other tutorials.  Just open a longer-than-usual document and use a vertical gradient.  Then just use the difference cloud filter to create cloudy shapes with a free form squiggly line down the middle.  Use the levels feature to darken the picture and adjust the color hue and saturation.  When you paste the image onto the main one, just switch the blending mode to screen so the black will turn transparent (then I used a mask to take out anything left over).

The next part is the orbs.  This was even easier than the lightning.  Just get a black background, and render a lighting flare.  Then use polar coordinates and set to rectangular.  Then rotate the image 180 degrees, and ‘re-polarize’ it.  Now, all the dark and light areas are in the right places.  Just crop the outer spaces and colorize it.

It is almost complete.  The orb takes a long time, but it is not hard.  Mostly, the effect comes from having a really big brush (the one made out of little shapes) and putting an outer glow and then setting the fill to zero.  Everything else is just circles and inner shadows.  After that, I put the red sphere over the orb and turned down the opacity, and hue/saturation.  Small touch-ups finally finished off the picture.