Subject:
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Picture Editing Tips part deux, as well as some other stuff.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.castle
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Date:
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Thu, 17 Jan 2002 07:07:21 GMT
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At the request of Wilson Raska, Tim Deering and a few others, I've decided to
post on picture editing again. You castle heads may or may not have noticed
this picture on my brickshelf account:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=103865
I've added to it in this pic:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104214
Some people like the first one better, others like the second. It's all a
matter of opinion of course. But I plan to show you how to do both.
If you missed my first tutorial, you can find it here:
http://news.lugnet.com/castle/?n=10810
I won't be going over null space and other photoshop basics, so if you don't
know what Null space or Opacity is, better read my first tutorial.
Well, to start out with, as like last time I use Adobe Photoshop 5.
But back to the editing. I started with a picture, like this, with the
background removed. The white space in photoshop is really null space, but
null space is turned white since I saved it to show in a seperate file:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104308
I took the picture with light behind the figs so that they were already
shadowed. This is actually a pic I used for the chapter 25 pictures. However,
I did other things to the picture for the chapter, the rain effects are just
something I did for fun.
Now, behind the figs I needed a dark background, to mimic a dark, stormy night.
Since I wanted it to look like the figs were being backlit, however, I needed
the ground to be illuminated a bit. So I created this as a layer behind the
fig layer.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104310
How did I do it?
Simple, really. I chose two arbitrary colors, a near black and a dark grey,
and used Photoshop Linear Gradient Tool on the blank layer, and got that. How
did I do it exactly? To use the Linear Gradient Tool, you first select the two
colors. Then you use the tool to draw a line. The direction you draw the
line is the directin the gradient will be. So for this pic, I drew the line
from bottom to top. This meant that I had the dark grey as my primary color
and the near black as my secondary. You can chose these colors by clicking on
the two boxes near the bottom of the tool bar. One box is overlayed on top of
the other slightly. This top box is your primary color. When you first click
and hold with the linear gradient tool, the point that starts the line is where
the primary color will start. The longer you make the Linear Gradient Tool
line, the more gentle the change between the two colors. The shorter the line,
the more sharp a change. I drew a line about an inch to an inch and a half
long.
I wanted the pic to be a downpour pic, heavy heavy heavy rain. So I needed
puddles with reflections under the figs. So I created this layer.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104312
To do this, I first had to copy the fig layer, and then flip it vertically.
You'll notice that when you do this, you can line up the figs in the back with
their feet, or the figs in front, but you can't do both. I had to use the
lasso tool to selectively highlight each upside down fig and match him up with
his right side up counterpart. However, this posed one problem. Greylen, the
yellowish orangeish fig, is partially covered by Garalt's shield. So I had to
use the Eyedropper tool to get the right color for his legs and then fill in
the missing pieces by hand using the pencil tool. It didn't matter just how
accurate I was, since I was planning on warping the upsidedown figs. And
here's how to do it. First you must have this layer highlighted. Then, click
on the filters tab on the top bar of Photoshop. These filters can do amazing
things that, with enough time and energy, you could duplicate, but why bother?
I used the Distort -> Wave filter to wobble up the figs' feet. Turned out
well I think.
Next, I wanted to create the illusion of rain splattering all over my figs. If
you notice in movies, and in the right circumstances in real life, heavy rain
causes a 'haze' or 'fog' on top of objects. What it really is, is the large
drops of water splattering into hundreds of little pieces as they hit. These
pieces will be small enough if the rain is moving fast and hard enough, and
will reflect light much like fog. After all, fog is just suspended water in
the air. So I created this:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104311
*Note*: the picture has a black background. I added this to show off what I
did. The picture actually has null space where the black is in real life. I
used the photoshop airbrush tool, in between the refelctions layer and the
background layer, and airbrushed at 1 pressure a light little haze on the very
top surface of the figs. It's not hard, really, just go slow and easy. Since
this layer is behind the figs and the reflections, you can use them as your
guides, the white airbrush will not cover them.
Finally, what's a rain pic without rain? This is where I got a little crazy,
and a little ingenius. I first took the same dark grey I used on the ground
and created a layer at the very top of the picture. I then used the paint
bucket and totally covered up my picture. *GASP*! Not to fear. I then
selected the top layer in the layer window, and moved the opacity slider down
to about 45%. This made the layer translucent, or simply able to be seen
through. Now we have a dark picture. Thats great, but its not rain. With the
same layer selected, I used the Noise -> Add Noise filter on the translucent
dark grey layer. I added a Monochromatic Gaussian noise of about 72. These
mean absolutely diddly unless you go try to use the filter, you'll understand
when you do. Now we have a speckled dark grey translucent layer. Great, but
its not rain. I then when into the Blur -> Motion Blur filter, and used a -90
degree 17 lengthed motion blur. What this does is turn all the little speckles
we created into long lines, which to me, anyway, looks an aweful lot like rain
at night.
After flattening and resizing, voila! We have this picture.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104306
However, some of the people I showed the picture to didn't like the idea of the
figs standing, as Troy put it, "on a lake," or as my roommate would put it,
"pulling a Jesus." Ok, so perhaps they're standing in a cart rutted mud road.
That's doable. Just like this:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104313
This layer goes between the figs and their reflections, as the mud not
underwater would disrupt their reflections. The dark haze surrounding the mud
is a mistake of mine, but I left it. I used the airbrush on a weak pressure
and painted brown streaks in random places. I then covered them with white
airbrush just like the figs, to make for a rain 'haze' effect. I then used the
Burn tool at a 40 exposure to darken some of the mud to create minifig shadows
where they were needed.
Of course then I flattened it, resized it, and voila.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=104307
I hope I was detailed enough to follow, for those of you who wanted to know.
As for the other stuff I had mentioned in the title, I just wanted to announce
to you who did not know that my Ldrawn dragon Formeathan won the Ldraw.org
Model of the Month. Pictures of the beast are here:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=86146
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=86147
I'm very proud and honored that my second Ldrawn dragon won the MOTM, just like
the first one. I wish to thank all who voted for me, and to those who were
competing against me, I wish you the best of luck next time. Sometime soon
I'll start the Ldrawing of the blue dragon, Tempi Frei. Perhaps after all four
are done, I will release the .dat files for them, if there is anyone actually
interested in them.
And thats all I have to say about that.
--Anthony
http://www.geocities.com/savatheaggie/legohome.html
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