campfire anthems____________________________burning away

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.

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.

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.

make yourself “pop” out of a picture

1) start with the original photo

2) duplicate the layer so that you have an identical copy, this will be labeled as “layer 1″

3) highlight with either the magnetic lasso tool or the pen tool to select the part of the photo you want to pop out

4) either copy and paste your selection to a new layer and delete layer 1, or delete everything in the background of your selection

5) using the rectangular marquee tool, highlight on the background layer a portion smaller than the original photo in which the upper most layer will pop out of

6) click on the layer tab, then create clipping mask, the edges of the photo will disappear, leaving you with an almost finished product

7) double click on the layer to open up your effects options, add a stroke around the background of the photo, make sure you change the stroke to be on the inside and give it a weight of about 13 pts

8 ) select layer 1 again and double click it, apply a drop shadow and you are finished

i have always looked at photography. more importantly, photography that has been manipulated into something more than just a picture. as a graphic artist, it seems like i learn some new tip or trick almost daily. i have, however, always wondered how people take a black and white image and bring color back into it. yesterday, i finally answered my lingering artistic question. for a good portion of the night before i went to bed, i played with this image i found online. here is what i came up with. not bad for a first go at it huh?

well i am smart. at least that what i like to think. i changed the ram and hard drive in my computer. i can do algebra and trigonometry. i can even convert picas to inches when designing in adobe cs3. when it comes to building things, however, i’m basically about as useful as a poopie flavored lolly pop. i can’t craft things from wood or various metals - i can barely hang a picture on the wall straight. i mean, i use to be kick butt with some legos® but my craftsmanship has dwindled away since my youth. what i’m getting at is the picture above. as most of you know i am a musician, namely a guitarist. because of this i think it is an innate characteristic that i am in love with guitar hero. this dude was telling me that i could even use my guitar hero controller from my xbox 360 and turn it into a midi device on my macbook to use for garageband.

::sidebar:: there are thousands of tiny girls screaming and running around outside of my window. where are their parents? probably smoking drugs and partaking in casual sex to reproduce even more probably raising their family to be good citizens and even better christians.

i digress. the man pictured above, i have no idea who he is, took a real/full sized squir stratocaster, put guitar here parts in it and made it a video game controller. sick i say. i have to go take excederin now for my headache…not for the thought of this great guitar feat but for the pain these girls have instilled deeply in my temple and behind my eyes. farewell friends.

with gas and petroleum prices sky rocketing these days, its getting hard fill up your car for a decent price. Just this morning, i saw that the majority of the gas stations were charging $3.30 for 87 octane. insane i say. well anywho, i ran across some helpful tips here on the interweb and thought it might be nice to share them with you. hopefully by implementing these things into you daily, weekly, whatever gas routine you can save a little cash and even maybe make your tank go farther.

#1 only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. the colder the ground the more dense the gasoline. when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening….your gallon is not exactly a gallon. in the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role. a 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business, but the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

#2 when you’re filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. if you look you will see that the trigger has three (3)stages: low, middle, and high. in slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. all hoses at the pump have a vapor return. if you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you’re getting less worth for your money.

#3 one of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is “half full” or “half empty”. the reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. this roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation.

#4 another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, do not fill up–most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

so there you have it. try it out. who knows, as crazy as some of this stuff sounds it just might work.