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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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…

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:

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.

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.

2(26) and butterfly7 by joesbirds from Pbase

To set up the photo for manipulation, I had to spend a little bit of time cutting out the focal point for my two pictures.  Actually, I had to get the photos first- and since the material I was working with dealt with animals, I went to one source I could count on for color and animals, my brother’s photos that he has posted at Pbase.  They are not creative commons, but he gave me permission to use his pictures (technically, that makes it “exclusive”, cool!)

What ended up happening in the “From parrot to cool background” tutorial  by vohyndrais that you take a simple picture of a bird (I ended up using a bird for practice and a butterfly for another look) and then warp it several times using distort: wave/twirl.  Also, one thing I learned through this tutorial is that by typing ctrl-shift-F, you can change the opacity of an effect allowing both the unfiltered image and the distorted image to be shown and interesting shapes are the end result. 

Also, by increasing the saturation of the coloration of the distorted picture, underlying colors that are not easily seen (without zooming in to see the actual pixels) are brought out and even the most color lacking picture gets large amounts of bright, complementary colors surrounding it.  Overall, I ended up liking the tutorial picture better, but only because the coloration of blue and green.  The effect is still really cool.

So, the first thing to tackle is the pen tool, and just free hand drawing in general, and the best place to draw is on Illustrator.  So I looked up some tutorials to try to create a very common object in graphic design- an advertisement/pamphlet (Note: no perspective needed, just depth.  The difference is one has a vanishing point, the other has shadows). 

The first thing I made was a flower that was actually very easy.  I just took the polygon tool, and set it to ten sides, a decagon, and set the size.  Then by adding a ‘pucker bloat’ effect and rough edge creates an uneven, natural petal look.  Then Just applying the gradient.  The next thing to do was create two more smaller petal levels by using pentadecagon (it is also called a pentakaidecagon) and using the tweak effect instead of pucker and it will move the ‘petals’ into each other to give it a more natural look.  The last level of petals called for a small circle and ‘zigzag’ it with 20 ridges and the use rough edges on it as well.  The end result:

Then, I tried to recreate a picture from a tutorial that I found by TripleTee.  I say recreate because after trying to make the picture, I quickly discovered that even though the tutorial was labeled as ‘beginner’, the author must be using a tablet, or I have a really big handicap because of my ‘marble’ mouse.  Unlike conventional optical, or even track ball mouses that move according to the way you push it, a marble mouse is guided by a big red ball that you move with you fingers:

cc “Logitech Marble Mouse Optical Trackball” by Saxguy

So, my main problem was the pencil tool.  For that, you must click and drag to make a completely free-form line.  As you can see, that is the one thing this mouse is not made for.  However, I just toned down the opacity to be able to hide some of the blemishes.  The rest of it, though, was fairly easy with the pen tool.  I followed the tutorial with all the shapes and the overall setting, but the author kept using the pencil tool, so I just had to ignore him.  After that, I added some text (I turned it into an invitation so I can use it again later) along with some lines and the “tropical” logo symbol.  Then I just arranged some flowers with varied opacity across the page.  I thought the outcome was pretty good.

(The file doesn’t upload correctly, see it here.  I was having problems uploading pictures to Flickr, but now I have to go and flag each photo myself to mark it as safe in order to allow it to be seen without being signed in.)