campfire anthems____________________________burning away

as always, its that time of the month to release my new calendar.  november’s was a little difficult for me to come up with, because i didn’t want to do a typical thanksgiving or post halloween wallpaper.  i started to a little research on quotes about fall and november and really liked the one featured in this month’s wallpaper.

the entire concept of the art is based on what the words are saying in the quote.  each season is represented with its appropriate art style applied.  i think the autumn leaf in the middle basically just sums up the whole thing.  i hope you guys enjoy it as much as i enjoyed creating it.

today’s lesson is short and simple, but can really save you some time or help you finish a potential masterpiece.  say you have a photo or a piece of art and you have run out of room and need a larger canvas space to either continue working or add a finishing border.  instead of having to re-setup the document preferences, you can simply expand the window (drag it out so you can see the gray around the work area) and use the crop tool.  “oh mike, you are so silly.  the crop tool is used to get rid of stuff and make it smaller, not to enlarge an area”  false.  with the crop tool selected, drag around the entire image (it won’t let you crop into the gray region).  before you hit enter/return to accept this action, simply select your arrow tool (keyboard shortcut “v”) and drag the marquee box out into the gray area.  now when you accept this action you will have a larger document space to work with.

for today’s photoshop trick i will be walking around the heart of savannah, ga.  visiting art museums and old cathedrals.  what?  you didn’t really expect me to work and think up a lesson on my vacation did you?  at least there will be some art in my day, even if it doesn’t involve photoshop.  maybe i’ll get some good pictures to post.

this week i want to hear what you have to say.  are there any cool tricks you know?

i have a huge ad due today at 5:00 pm. its the biggest ad i’ve done and its in a national glossy, full color magazine. its kind of a big deal. i’ve been fighting deadlines and working with very little information/pictures. a company we hired flew some aerial photography and sent me the proofs late in the afternoon. i picked the one that was going to be best for the ad to show all the property and this is what i had to work with.

as you can see it was a little hazy up there that day. this didn’t really leave me with a good photo to use for my ad so i did a little color editing, added some highlights and shadows, corrected the hue, and added some photo filters to rebuild the aerial so that i could use it.  here is what i came up with.

not bad huh?

this week i will be discussing the benefits of using the shadow/highlights adjustment that can be accessed under the image tab on the tool bar.  this image adjustment can be very helpful when dealing with an image that is either too dark or too bright.  i come across a lot of people who use the burn and dodge tools to add lighting details to photos, and although this can be a method to add shadows or highlights to an image, it is rather ineffective and can be more trouble than it is worth.  the image i have chosen is one that is too dark and needs a little more light in it.

with the image open, select the image tab on the menu and then adjustments.  from this drop-down menu, select the shadow/highlights option.  this will bring up a new dialog box in which you will be able to add and take away light.  make sure that the “preview” box is checked so that you will be able to see the outcome of your editing.  i like to show more options so that i can really tweak the settings to get the best effect.  the sliders are pretty self explainatory, so just play around with them until you get the effect you are hunting.  you can also tweak the color correction, to help bring back some of the natural colors that are lost from the original image.  when you are finished just click “ok” and you are done.  this is what i came up with.  hope you’ll be able to use this trick some time.

hey guy!  i’ve been waiting a couple of weeks for this day.  my new september wallpapers are up for all to use.  just go up to the wallpapers tab at the top of the page to use them.  this month we have a darker wallpaper about death, but it helps to remind that in death there is victory and a new beginning.  the other wallpaper is my tribute to apple computers.  i took some liberty in creating the new apple logo, kind of an evolution of sorts.  i hope you guys enjoy this month’s art.

this week we will learn how to create custom actions so that you can do the same thing to numerous photos.  this really comes in handy for me at work a lot of the time.  say, for instance, you have a photo to upload onto a website.  you have to change the dpi from 300 to 72, change the pixel width to 400, auto adjust the shadows and highlights of the image, save it for the web and save it in a special folder on your desktop.  not so bad i guess.  now say you have to do that to 99 more photos.  that’s what i though.  this is when a custom action can be a life saver.  after you create one, all you have to do is hit the  “play” button in the window and it will edit the image, according to your parameters, time and time again.

first off, i am using photoshop cs3, so there may be a little discrepancy from the previous edition, but concept will be the same.  if its not already open, which it probably isn’t, you need to make the actions window visible.  to do this, go up to the menu and drop down the window tab and click on actions.  inside the action window you will see an icon that will allow you to create a new action, very similar to the create a new layer in the layers window.  select this option, which will open a new dialog box.  give the action a general name, or if you are working with a group of photos for the same project you can give it a job specific title.  when you have the name click “record.”  it is important to note that at this point everything you do will be recorded, so make sure you know exactly what you want to do before you click this.  once you have clicked record, you will notice the record icon has changed to red, just like on a vcr or tape recorder.  simply take your first photo and do whatever you need to do to it.  change the resolution, pixel dimension, coloring, etc until you have your finished product.  save the image in the appropriate format and in the appropriate place on your hard drive/desktop.  i like to close the image when i’m done with it so that every time i use the action it knows to close the document, which is just one less step i have to worry about.  once you have done everything you need to do hit the “stop” button in the actions window, which looks like any other square stop button you have ever seen on anything.  you are now ready to use your action.  with your next document open, all you have to do is click the “play” button and every step you recorded will be executed.

so the next time you have 25, 50, or even 100 items you need to edit identically in photoshop, use an action…better yet…take action.  most importantly - work smarter, not harder.

adding rain to an image

1) select your picture (i’ve used this great photo of tiger woods celebrating after a putt) and dupliate it to a new layer.  you can do this by pressing “command j” (mac) / “control j” (win)

2) make sure that black is the default foreground color.  you can reset your colors by pressing “d” on the keyboard.  pick the crop tool and draw a box about an inch around your image.  you may have to make the window bigger to do this.  once you have drawn your cropping box press enter/return.  you will now have a white border around your image.

3) create a new blank layer at the top and fill it with black.  you can either do this from the menu or by the keyboard shortcut “option delete” (mac) / “alt backspace” (win)

4) now you will add noise to the black layer.  go up to filter, noise, and then add noise.  i made the amount slider to be around 150.  make sure that the distribution is uniform and select for the noise to be monochromatic.

5) add a gaussian blur to the noise layer.  go to filter, blur, and then gaussian blur.  put the radius on about .5 and click “ok”.

6) add an adjustment layer to the black layer.  make sure when you click on the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers window you hold down the  “option” (mac) / “atl” (win) button.  drag the mouse up to the levels selection.  when the dialog box opens click “use previous layer to create clipping mask” and then click ok.

7) with the levels dialog box open, play around with the sliders on the histograph to remove a bit of the noise on that layer.  my input levels were 134, 1.00, and 189.  click ok.

8 ) select layer 2 again and add a motion blur.  you want the angle to be around 60 and the distance to be set to about 50 pixels.

9) now double click back on the adjustment layer to reopen the histogram.  adjust your sliders again to work with the motion blur.  my input levels are now at 73, 1.00, and 158.  press ok.

10) hide all the layers except the background layer.  using the rectangular marquee tool highlight around the original border of the image, cropping out the extra space we adding in the beginning.  go up to image and click crop.  now you can turn the other layers back on.

11) with the top, noise level, highlighted you can now change the blend mode from normal to screen.  this will overlay the rain effect onto the original image. the effect is now finished.  if you want, you can use the burn tool on the bottom layer to add shadows to the picture.  i used it on the fans in the background to make the image appear more realistic.

today we are going to discuss how to turn a photo into what looks like a hand drawn sketch, without using artistic filters. this photo of my wife is what i’ll be using.

1) the first thing you want to do is duplicate the image onto a new layer. a quick way of doing this is pushing “command j” (mac) / “control j”(win)

2) now you want to desaturate the photo. this option is found by going to image and then adjustments. a quicker way of doing this is the keyboard shortcut of “shift command u” (mac) / “shift control u” (win)

3) duplicate the desaturated layer by pressing “command j” (mac) / “control j”(win)

4) invert the new layer so that the black colors become white and the white black. this is as simple as pressing “command i” (mac) / “control i” (win) on the keyboard.

5) with the top layer selected, its now time to change the blend mode. this determines how the selected layer will blend with the layer directly beneath it. to do this access the drop down window from the tab that is currently listed as normal form the layers window. change the top layer’s blend mode from normal to color dodge. this temporarily changes the top layer to just a white box, but we are getting ready to fix that.

6) with the top layer still selected, go up to your filter menu and select blur and then gaussian blur. this one step makes your sketch come to life. at the bottom of the gaussian blur dialog box you will see a slider that changes the radius of the blur. play around with the slider, make sure the preview box is checked, until you find a number that works for your photo. generally a smaller number works better, but there really isn’t a standard setting, due to different resolution settings pictures are taken in. for this particular photo i kept if around 7.

that’s it. you have now turned that photo into what appears to be a hand drawn sketch. you could be finished here or you can use the burn tool to really give that sketch some lighting depth, but that is up to you my friends. here is the sketch with and without the burn tool applied.