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: