Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Thanks for the kind words, Craig!

There were stages of "Ah Hah", starting with small Ah Hah`s:  The first one was the simple but exciting realization that just because a shot was a little underexposed, or taken in mid-day when colors are muted, one could still tweak light and saturation and get a photo closer to what I actually saw. (I use a simple P&S digital.)

The next "Aha!" was better: It came when I realized the less I tweaked, the more subtle and realistic the results.

Then the bigger "Aha`s":

"Hey, I can actually create original work using elements I cut out of several photos and then rendering the rest":

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q108/goeththefirst/logo3c opy_edited-1.jpg

But my biggest Aha, which I don`t have an example of on this PC, was when I learned to use the Dodge and Burn tools to make the disparate elements behave the same way based on the lighting.

Fun!

Hey, that`s a nifty glass! I`m gonna mess with it, because I think I have a way to do a better shadow. :-) That`s my current "thing," don`t`cha know. I hope you won`t mind....

Transparent Shadows experiment from lowcostmailing`s pic. I`m working to learn how to make realistic shadows, and this glass is an opportunity. The problem is that not only does light pass through the glass, it also develops a slighty colored shadow. I took it out of the original, then put one shadow for the glass, where the stem and bowl pass some light. I put a second shadow around the bottom of the base, with a vector line, and used guassian blur on both, but to different degrees. Again, I`m only learning how to play with shadows. :-) Not trying to change the original pic.

As for changing light in exposures, not long ago I picked up a really interesting trick, using the color temperature. In PSP, it`s called the "Gray World Color Balance," under the "Adjust > Color Balance" menu option.

What it does is change the color temperature, using the Kelvin scale. Sunlight (normal) is about 5500K-6500 degrees Kelvin. (Kodak went outside at their main facility, one day, on a clear sunny afternoon and measured the temperature. They then created the baseline, used in photography everywhere.)

When I had a pic that was a bit underexposed, I adjusted the contrast and brightness, histogram and levels, and so forth. I adjusted some of the colors and channels, but it still didn`t "feel" like the sunny day when I took the picture. Then I started messing with the color temperature, and Wah-Lah! that did it...! :-)

Hello All,

Here`s my entry for pictures. http://www.precision-ar.com/pictext.jpg  It`s nowhere as impressive as the moebius logo, in fact it`s just a cut and paste combining two scanned photographs, with a translucent box with opaque text overlaid, which was created with Paint Shop Pro.

It`s on the home page of my website, http://www.precision-ar.com.

By the way, thanks to the feedback from the regulars on the forum about my website, which I posted to the "critique my website" part of the forum.

Joe

Wow. This thread has been busy!

1- CraigL: I really like what you did to my glass` shadow. Much more realistic. Nice tweak!

2- Kathy- thanks for the kind words, but, beware, compliments will get you more pictures:

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q108/goeththefirst/dianes floralminiatures_edited-1.jpg

(CraigL- thanks for the tip about photobucket)

3-Joe- like your work. Aerosmith is always a good choice!

That Aerosmith quote over the CD player is totally cool..! It reminds me of how often low-tech is more elegant. I used to do a lot of word processing, reformatting and that sort of thing, and worked with another really skilled MS Office person. We would go back and forth, always looking for the most obscure things we could learn in our down time.

We realized fairly early on that not all situations call for reformatting. In some cases, it was faster to just start over and re-type the entire document, correctly set up. I never forgot the lesson, and before I start tweaking layers and objects, I try to think about it and ask if it really needs all that work. "Less if More" in so many instances, it pays to really keep it in mind. This ad from Audio Poohbah is such a great example! :-D Nice!

LowcostMailing, that ad for floral items works for me! I`m learning that although I can tweak things (like editing) and change or format them, I`ve never been all that good at coming up with original work directly. I don`t draw very well, except in a mechanical drawing sense, and admire folks who can come up with interesting layouts.

hmm...Thinking about it, for those graphic designers here, as I go about looking at these "critique my Web site" threads, I see a lot of sites that could benefit from a much better layout. Maybe that`s a secondary product line you all could offer?
:-)

Lowcost,

I love your work, but that first picture freaked me out a bit.  I was thinking..."was this guy at my wedding?" 

Desert Botanical Garden?
http://www.dbg.org

Keep those pics coming.  I love the desert!

CG

 

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Scott Alberts
Alberts Illustration & Design
http://www.scottalberts.com/
My Email

Jeez Louise, Scott....that`s a fantastic looking site!! Dayum!

I have a friend who decided to go back to school, mostly to have some fun learning about art. She`d liked to draw when she was younger, then life got in the way. One class (we`d IM about her experiences) was all about that egg-tempera technique, which didn`t make all that much sense to me. I use eggs for cooking. :-D

Your explanation makes a whole lot more sense, as it connects with something like PSP. Would you be willing to expand that just a tad, here? I`ve had a helluva time trying to get a gold effect (silver or copper too, for that matter) in the "flat" environment of a graphics computer application.

What you`ve done is superb, and really works! I`m totally impressed, and have visions of finding a "Web Layout" expert, as distinct from a Web Designer type of person. :-D

Thanks for the encouragement, everyone. I haven`t been very good at reciprocating, only showing-off! I think most of you know more about the correct use of the software; I lean on my painting & drawing background.

I can`t apply (or even understand!) a lot of the non-Mac technical suggestions. I invested last year in a big Mac and a big monitor and CS2 (and a big scanner) so that I could do more traditional art and rely LESS on the computer, except for tweaking art and delivering it digitally. The current set-up lets me trust the on-screen results a bit more, as long as I at least TRY to calibrate the monitor. But as it has developed, I am doing a lot of logo work in Illustrator as well as web graphics and page layout (for print).

The gold-leaf effect is different every time, Craig, but the principle is based on color vibration. You need to have "holes" in the gold layer, whether via selecting and dropping out specks of color (try Adding Noise and/or Sharpen More first), using a textured brush, or even finding a sandstone-type texture and making your gold out of that. The underlying dark-blue has to show through without really being noticed. Not by opacity or blending, but, as I called it and as it is indeed in painting, "dry-brushing" the gold over the blue. In actual painting, I do have the specific color mix written down here somewhere, but it`s for tempera pigments.  Then, when it`s looking close to what you want, add gradients of light & dark, and highlights to trick the eye. Very intuitive and visual, not technical and systematize-atory-able(!).


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Scott Alberts
Alberts Illustration & Design
http://www.scottalberts.com/
My Email

Guy, thanks very much for the elaboration! :-)

I don`t think Mac or PC really matters, if as you said, people understand the functions of their graphics program. What matters is that you`ve explained what has to happen. I can think of about 5 different ways to accomplish putting "holes" in the gold layer, so I`ll "mess wid` it," so to speak.

Consider that if I were to ask you what color gold you were using, you could list the HSL and RGB values, and it wouldn`t matter at all which type of platform we were using, right? So too, I think the benefit of a forum like this is to exchange technical graphics ideas.

To reference the start, I remember how much I enjoyed reading "Modern Photography" magazine, years ago, when I got into photography. I didn`t understand half of what I was reading, but it inspired me to learn. It was a technical forum, where people would show a photograph then explain how they took the pic.

So too, it`s not all that easy to find online sites where people can show what they`ve done in a graphics app., and explain how. Or, answer questions as you`ve done here. Thanks again! (I`m going to essperiment now!)