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.

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