20% Time 4/22/08

It’s text effects and fonts week!

All extravagance aside, these two texts are pretty cool.  I found them in my Google reader and they were both from the same site, so apparently the author has been quite busy.  First of all, one bit of knowledge that I poses is that ‘fonts’ on a computer refer to the shape of the letters.  Yet, in reality, font refers to the size of letters and the ‘typeface’ refers to the shapes.  Anyway, I downloaded two fonts this week to do my experiments on.  The first one should look familiar, it was used in the ads for all of the spider-man 3 movie… it is called homoarakhn and looks really cool.  The next one reminds me of the old centipede arcade game lettering and is called zorque.

 The first tutorial that I did was called Biohazard Text.  Mostly, it looks green, grimy, and pretty much what the name implies.  Overall, it was easy to do, it is just that I wanted to have the same coloration as the tutorial to be sure that I was doing it correctly, so I had to enter each color reference number in for each and every color.  But, anyway, I just had to make a zorque font text (I typed “CENTIPEDE”) and then progressed with about three layers of blending effects and gradient overlays (I understand the importance of gradients, but why all at the same time? Why!?)  Then, I downloaded the “rust” picture provided, cropped it, and set it to overlay so that the green colors underneath of it could show through.  At the end, I was left with this result:

Next, I tried out a tutorial called “Lightning Text“.  This one I really liked.  It shows you how to type a word, and then have lightning all around it.  I downloaded homoarakhn, just because I found it and really wanted to use it, and typed the word “STORM” (I had just finished playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and it was a good idea at the time).  The whole idea of it is actually really simple.  Just create a new layer with the filter “stained glass” and then select the text, expand the selection by five or so pixels, and then delete all the extra lines.  Then after warping the layer a bit, I just had to add some outer glows, inner glows, and color overlays to make it look like real lighting.  So, with some gradient effects and a new layer with the text moved around and partially masked to give the picture a little shiny reflection at the bottom.  I ended up with this:

20% Time 4/15/08

Well, I was really hoping to get started on a project this week having to do with HDR photos.  What is that?  Professional ones use three or more pictures (best if done in the RAW, 16 bit, format) that include a regular picture, one over exposed and one underexposed.  Then, all a person has to do is scan or sync camera to a computer, open up photoshop and “merge to HDR”.  Then, a couple adjustment layers later, you get crystal clear, vibrant pictures which blend the darkest darks with the lightest lights that are just physically impossible to capture with a camera, if not all together nonexistent in the first place.

Despite the total coolness of this ability, I do not have CS2 - in short, no capability whatsoever to create HDR pictures.  Then, I stumbled onto a tutorial that does not need the special merging and only requires effects and adjustments.  So I booted up photoshop and diligently tried to look for the extremely important “shadow/highlight” adjustment only to find that my program is insanely old (photoshop 7- it almost makes me want to consider bootlegging CS3).

So, after my crushing defeat, I went back to the trusty snowdrip tutorials and tried one that I probably already knew how to do.  I started off trying to find a good landscape picture and finally found one via flickrcc.

cc “Landscape from Kuwait City” by Khalid Almasoud

So, I got the picture and started on the tutorial.  Basically, just open a new, larger document and turn the background black.  Then put in the add noise filter, and motion blur the whole thing.  Then, by adjusting the RBG levels to lessen the amount of rain and darken the overall picture.  After that, just drag it over to the original picture and set the blending to screen and all the black background will disappear.  Then I added a quick bolt of lightning (in a previous post) and tried to put it in a spot that would give it enough room to actually be seen.

I wish flickrcc was more comprehensive… the tall building in the middle is the Kuwait freedom tower.  The picture was taken by an Arabic photographer and I did not realize any of this until after I started posting all this.  I did not want to be seen as anti anything, I just really liked the picture.  At least I did not have the lighting hitting the Freedom Tower.

20% Time 4/1/08

Well, it is April Fool’s so I was going to try something different.  I am going to find an interesting tutorial and try to make it look like something completely different from the original effect.  So I went back to snowdrip to look for some more effects and actually chose one that I originally thought was cool, but ,once I saw the tutorial, thought the author was completely lost.  It was called “abstract colored chrome“.  His picture, unfortunately, looked nothing like the inspiration picture.  However, I went ahead and did it anyway, and found that the tutorial pictures were just uploaded to the site strangely and the finished result actually does look exactly like the ‘original’.

So, I worked through the tutorial rendering clouds, smoothing them out with the chrome filter, then ink outlining them to give them darker edges, and then using a sine wave filter and color balance layers to warp and colorize them and then a saturation layer to brighten all the colors.  Eventually, it gave me a big, wavy mass of shiny colors.  I did not know what to do.  It gave me a surfing kind of feel, but I did not know what to do.

  You should be able to see the chrome look the author and I were going for.

So, I just went and did a couple polarizing effects to try to manipulate the shape of the overall picture.  It was then that I noticed that one of the shapes looked like a sun rising over the hill, and another looked like a hooded figure.  So I moved them off the original layer and re-sized them and blended them back into the globe shape that had resulted from all the polarizing.  It ended up looking like a crystal ball from some fantastic land, with a weary traveler on an epic journey to find… well whatever it is he is trying to find.

 This one is a little harder to see, but can you see the little pictures within it (a rising sun, and a cloaked figure)?

I then reopened the ‘flat’ version and tried to get something else out of the same picture.  I turned it back into a sphere by polarizing it, and ended up selecting the color black and increasing the ‘fuzziness’ to 200 in the dialog box (to include all the dark colors surrounding the black).  Then, copying to a new layer (ctrl+j) I took the selection, deselected, and applied a radial blur set to zoom at 100%.  This left me with a blurry, lightly colored ball.  That made me think about trying to recreate an eye.  So then, I used a adjustment curves layer to brighten the colors and a color balance layer to intensify them and get the proper color arrangement.  Then I selected a small circle in the center and deleted it so that (because I had a black background to showcase the colorization) the ‘eye’ now has a pupil.  I am going to try to get some more effects using the colored chrome as a base.

  If you cannot see this one, then I am really worried.