20% Time 5/20/08

Well, my parents anniversary party was this weekend (it went well by the way) and I ended up emailing a picture of my parents that I had cleaned up, not the same as what I had posted, to be enlarged and printed on a canvas.  I finally got a chance today for a chance to even get near a computer.  As a result, I am going to be posting an old picture I generated on photo-shop.

I found the image on tutorializedthat ended up having a very cool result.  It looks like a star scape with nebula in the foreground.  Just start off a black background and add noise for the stars.  Now, one thing I liked about how the tut is that it explains that because the noise particles are so small that it looks really weird, so if you enlarge the background image a bit, the spaces and the ’stars’ get bigger.  Then, I made a new layer and chose a background color for the cloud filter.  After that, apply the filter until you get a layout that you really like.  Then, just adjust the blending mode until the size and opacity levels that are desired are reached.  However, that is only one color.  For additional colors, you need to make a new layer, apply another cloud filter and then alt+click the triangle that controls the blending amounts to divide it into two smaller triangles and then drag the right one as far down as you like.  This blends the one color into only the space of the other color so all the clouds are coherent.  The blending effects are very powerful, but also very complicated to understand because of it.  Finally, add some blurred circles for really bright stars and you are done.

This is the end result:

20% Time 5/12/08

This week is a little different because of my hectic schedule.  During Tuesday, I had to take my AP Environmental Science test and wasn’t able to spend the normal amount of my time looking up new tutorials.  However, since I have been looking into several open source programs from the open disc.  The one in particular that I have been really interested in is a 3D animation program called Blender.

I have actually found plenty of very interesting tutorials on my usual haunt: tutorialized.  I was originally going to post an actual animation, but my video card can’t handle the game engine on blender (you use that for physics, like domino stuff).  Then, I tried an animation using key frames.  I just had a simple take off and landing of a rocket using a cone, cylinder, and particle emitting planes (particles are really fun with key frames).  In the modeling area (just the usual 3d editing screen without the actual render, just shapes) it looked ok, but it took to long to render and position the ‘camera’ to fit the whole thing in.  So I tried to take a screen-cast of the modeling animation itself, but my RAM gave out. 

Here I just rendered a specific frame, the default background is sky blue.

Finally, I gave up on the entire idea of being able to upload a video and switched over to jpegs.  I found another tutorial by super3boy that showed you how to make grass.  It was actually really easy.  Just start off with a plane, add particles, and change to static.  From there, just apply the amounts to determine the height, and direction of the blades.  Then by copying and rotating a couple times.  Finally, make one final plane and turn it brown, along with the previous to green.

The outcome is really cool for the amount of time it takes.

20% Time 5/5/08

Since I am slowly finding out that the amount of new stuff that I can actually learn online is becoming more and more restricted as the weeks pass, I have become more and more challenged to think of things that I can do.  Fortunately, this month is my parents anniversary and I have been chosen for several projects dealing with getting everything ready.  So, the first thing I wanted to do was actually to try restoring some of their wedding pictures from 35 years ago.

The first thing I realized on Tuesday is that either no freelancers know how to restore pictures, or those that actually know don’t really want to give out ‘trade secrets’ or something like that.  I did not enter any forums for fear of being deemed snoopy or unsportsmanlike etc.  Fortunately for me, my brother actually used to work for OCB and used to actually do restorations quite often.  Now, when I say restoration, I do not mean colorizing black and white pictures, I mean putting colors back into aging photos that are turning sepia and getting speckled.  So I quizzed him and pretty much found out that “Levels are your friend”.  By getting the scanning the picture, opening it up, and then redistributing the levels to balance the colors, the picture will regain nearly all of the original color.

For the first picture, I did all this but still needed to do some selective stuff.  First, the hand on my dad was way too pale and I had to go use the lasso tool and a color balance layer to match it to the rest of him.  Then, the shoulder on his suit was too light compared to the rest of it.  On the next picture, I had to repeat the first process, then had to go and actually adjust all the background shadows in order to see my parents a bit better.  Then, I finished the photos up by taking the clone stamp tool at about ten pixels and cleaned up any really grainy areas, or smudges, scratches, etc.  I probably spent about an hour for both, the techniques are really easy.  From here, I might use them for invitations, email them to my brothers for prints, or whatever. 

Click for a closer view…

For future entries, I might be experimenting on Blend…