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.