20% Time 6/2/08

Posted on June 8, 2008 by 25meip.
Categories: Required Post, 20%.

The school year is almost over!  Just one more week, then finals, and we are through.  Woohoo!

Anyway, this week I decided to try some more effects with blurring.  I found one tutorial for Gimp on tutorialized, but you can do the exact same thing with photoshop.  Actually, the overall effect turned out to be really similar to the exploding planet picture from way back a few months ago.  (New tuts are so hard to find, the only thing I really need is some new vectors to use, but again, very hard to find becasue the world runs on CS3 nowadays).  On the plus side though, the effect is still quite different and striking, and as soon as you see it, you will probably recognize it.  It is all generated on the computer, no pictures were edited, so it looks alot like some of my earlier posts, kind of reinicesent-y.

So, I started off with a text layer “aero nova tech”.  It is an inside joke; I know a guy who is trying to upstart a kind of backyard buisness with this name and uses any and every opportunity at school to advertise.  So I was thinking that alot of graphis design has to do with advertisement and that this would be an interesting little ‘hats off’ to this “company”. 

After that, I had a blackbackground put in and I duplicated the text.  After I had combined one of the duplicates with the background, I applied a polar coordinates filter to the image to unpolarize it across the top of the screen.  Then after rotating the picture, I applied some wind to the text, both left and right.  Then after repolarizing it back to how it was before, plus all of the rays that are now coming off of it, I had to actually do two motion blur filters with the zoom setting centered around the “o” in order to clarify the wind edges and amplify it a bit.

Then I took the original text layer and duplicated it one more time and expanded it by two pixels, blured it by 10 pixels, and set it to screen and placed it under the original text layer also.  Then, I changed the text to black so that it stands out and changed the color balance of the rays in the background.  This was the end result:

techadvert.jpg

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20% Time 5/20/08

Posted on June 1, 2008 by 25meip.
Categories: Required Post, 20%.

Well, this week was interesting.  All my teachers decided to give out projects at the exact same time, and of course, who doesn’t enjoy the thrill of procrastination?  Anyway, this week, I decided to try out that seemingly popular style of picture known as the montage…(I think).  Basically, you start off by picking a style (retro with old ads, posters and faded colors; grunge with big spatters, rock equipment -that is kind of optional depending on what you are doing, and dark colors; or even urban with 3D stars, drippy clouds and circles, bars, and cityscape stuff- ex: buildings, graffiti, chain fences, and all that good stuff.  If you look around, that style is getting very popular.  The only problem with this is that it takes a great deal of time and creativity to prep a really nice piece.

Since I have no stash of picture clips or even one piece of ‘urban’ clip art to my name, I went to a website I found on Delicious called Design Bum by issara.  I perused around and decided that I really liked most of his work, especially since he wants to help out the design community and put up everything for download.  Now, I was just going to get the pieces called layered 1 and 2, but then I saw a button off on the side that said: “Download all Downloads”.   Ooooooh!  Needless to say, it was a 233 MB zip file (it contained within it about 20 other zip files).  I have entire programs on my flash-drive that take up less memory than that!

Anyway, I got everything set up to get going, and had no idea what to do.  I did not just want to copy the whole picture, all that cropping and composing takes time (believe me, I know that now), so looked up some tuts.  (By the way, when I opened the layered retro montages, they were about 150 layers each and took about a minute just to open up on my computer, forget about the time it takes to switch between windows).  I found a tutorial by SGlider12 right away that really set the base for my picture.   For it, I had to open up The Gimp (yes, this program takes up less space than the pictures it can produce) as well as an old picture of me with a hat that I liked.  Then, I tried to different color settings.  The first was a low color threshold, another was a lighter color threshold.  I saved both as jpegs and then used Photoshop to take the parts that I liked from both and merged the layers.  After setting the layer to darken, the white all disappeared and I was free to make a background color.  I ended up choosing a dull blue that would contrast nice with the yellows and reds that I had from the downloaded montages.

LighterDarker

This effect is actually getting very, very popular, so it would do me good to keep working on it.  See if you can tell which parts of each I used in the final image.

That was the first part.  Next, since there were so many layers, I set my cursor to automatically select any layers I clicked on and just threw those pictures all around to dig for neat little clips.  Whenever something caught my eye, I dragged it out, and arranged it on my canvas.  For the most part, everything fit and only a few things needed cropping (such as the large brown newspaper up top that originally covered the whole thing, and the torn paper at the bottom that covered the picture too much).  Despite all this, I feel that it came out really nice, with its little newspapers, numbers, ads, and those weird pipe/machinery fixtures around the edges- you’ll know what I am talking about in a second.  Granted, it is not as filled and busy as the professional montages, but it still carries a cool spirit.

The Montage of Fun

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