image combination and creation - the power of photoshop

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on May 30th, 2009

I’ve been amazed by the special effects created in Photoshop for a long time, and this time I would like to make one by myself. Steps are as follows:

image 1: boy and ground
layer mask to select the part of the boy and ground that I want. and clone stamp to create the ground and ground edge.
shadow/Highlight was used to correct the brightness of the image. use the sun image as the color match source file, to apply it to boy and ground.

image 2: sea
free transform to stretch the pic and get rid of the sun. save it as the displace map. render light to the sea. and do displace of the sun shine. reflection of the clouds on the left side of the sea surface, filter used is motion blur and blend mode is softlight with opacity 20%.

image 3: sky and orange clouds
clone stamp to create part of the sky and get rid of the mountain. Free transform, perspective and scale to have more depth and to get rid of the mountain and composite with the sea.

image 4: crystal ball
techniques used: inner shadow, inner glow, linear gradient, sphere distort, hard brush, soft brush, square to polar distort.

image 5: sun
techniques used are as follows:filters: render clouds, render difference clouds, find edge;
image adjustments: levels, hue & saturation;
blend mode linear dodge.

FINAL IMAGE - the enlightened universe:

enlightened_universe_final

Gestalt is well accomplished in here. I separate the image into 5 objects: the sky with orange clouds, the surface of the sea, the boy and the ground, the fake sun and a fake crystal ball. The first 3 are from photos, the last two are made up by myself with Photoshop techniques and tools. Now, all the objects look like in one environment. I was trying to make the image match the color of the fake sun, since it is the shiniest part of the image. Therefore, the tone of the image will be yellowish orange. The theme of the image will be mystery. Sun is abnormally huge, the boy is standing in front of the sun on a high and steep ground, holding a crystal ball, just like a little witch.

There are quite some challenges I met in this project, like the colors of the original 3 images don’t go along with each other, the surface of the sea need to have reflection of the sun shine, etc. Therefore, in this project I would say this biggest effort I made is to integrate the objects to make it look like in one environment, which required the techniques in image adjustment and level adjustment.

2 Comments » | Tags: fun, Photoshop | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

Toy Room - Photoshop: brush, vanishing point transform and more

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on May 27th, 2009

With given components of the toys, I designed a 3-D environment (walls and floor and window) and a colorful toy box with shadows and vanishing point, plus a photo frame.

giftbox_final_less

A few highlights of this photoshop creative:

The brush I created is for the surface of toy box. The original brush is from the Assorted brush set, named concentric circles. I basically modified its master diameter to 200px and set the shape dynamics settings: size Jitter to 100%, minimum diameter to 15%. For the colorful background of the toy box, I actually customized another brush from Assorted brushes, called texture 6. I modified its master diameter to a much larger one and added the color dynamics feature to make it vary in Hue and saturatioin as well. In order to make the white circles integrated into the whole painting, I used the blend mode Lighten and opacity 90%. Then I think the white concentric cirle really goes with the abstract background of the toy box painting.

customized_brush21 giftbox_layers

I am using the CS version, therefore, I created the 3-point perspective all by transforming, without the vanishing point filter. I used the lines as the guide for the perpective, as shown in the image of the perspective box.

giftbox_perspective1

I set the environment as a corner of a room with a window on one side. I think this way, it will make it clear to the audience where the light source located. And having a little witch floating outside the window make the picture more interesting. Everything including the window, wall, floor and toys in the enviroment is transformed into 3-D.

The shadows are made according to the light source from the window. As the window is on the left side of the environment, all the shadows are heading toward the right side, except the shadow of the motocyle, because it is leaning on the left side wall, just underneathe the window, its shadow is on the wall.

The first frame is made from the texture of the roof on the house (one of the toys). The 3-D effect (bigger pattern in the middle, small pattern on the sides) are achieved by utilizing the technique of alpha channel. I like this effect, it looks pretty real.

2 Comments » | Tags: design, Photoshop | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

Gestalt - Desert & Dream Illustration

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on March 19th, 2009

The overall impact of your image should reflect a visual statement or quality known as “gestalt”. When you see an image as a “unified whole”, you are seeing the gestalt in the image. Briefly, gestalt refers to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The following art work called “desert & dream” is composed of a number of elements, and is an example of gestalt. Each element is created within one layer in Illustrator. The layers are demonstrated hereby.

desert & dream Illustrator art songm-final-resized2-layer

Desert & Dream, Illustrator Image (10 Layers):

1.    sky and moon: Sky was created with the RECTANGLE SHAPE and filled with a GRADIENT dark blue to light blue. Moon was created with two ELLIPSE SHAPE and PATHFINDER TECHNIQUE: SUBTRACT FROM AREA was applied.
2.    dimmed star: Draw a star with STAR SHAPE. Use the star to CREATE A SCATTER BRUSH, name it star. Use the pencil tool to randomly draw some circle. Apply the star scatter brush to the circles. There will be stars in the sky now. Select the stars, apply EFFECT GAUSSION BLUR to them. Then set the TRANSPARENCY mode to screen, opacity to 60%.
3.    bright star: The same as dimmed star, except no transparency.
4.    meteor: Draw a STAR SHAPE filled with white, and then a small ELLIPSE SHAPE filled with blue. Select both objects, and apply BLEND to them. Use the blend options: specified steps 12. Use the PEN tool to edit the path on the blend shape to make it bend a little bit. Use the SCALE and ROTATION transformation tool to adjust its length and width as well as the direction the meteor goes to.
5.    bg and river: There are three main objects here. Two red grounds, created by the PEN tool. And a river in between. River is filled with GRADIENT (dark blue to light blue). To make it look more water-like, I used the BRUSH tool to draw some lines and used GAUSSION blur.
6.    reflect: These are the objects in the river: the Moon, Stars and the Meteor. The REFLECT TRANSFORMATION is used. For the reflected moon, the SCRIBBLE effect was applied. And the reflected meteor and stars, the TWEAK effect was applied.
7.    desert: the red ground is supposed to be the desert, but it may not look so. Basically, I just draw several columns using the PEN tool, apply effect of DROP SHADOW, and connected them with BLEND (specific steps) to make the ground. Since the blended ground shape is a little bit different from the shape I want the desert to be, I used the two bg shapes to create MASK on them, which is shown in the layer panel.
8.    my girl: Use the PEN tool to sketch the face and hair of girl. Some hair is in front of the face, and some are behind it. So the hairon and hair down layers were created above and underneath the face. The art brush: Fude was used for the stroke of the hair and face. Create a drop of tear and use it to CREATE a SCATTER BRUSH, name “tear”.   Apply the brush on the girl’s face and hair.
9.    type: copy the outmost hair path of the girl, and apply the TYPE ON A PATH tool. Use the character of “Bernhard Modern Std, Bold Italic” and 23pt. Fill color set to pink.
10.    light: the last layer is added to make a light spot in the river on top of the reflected meteor. Two 4points stars were created on top of each other, one big and one small, filled with white and no stroke. GAUSSION BLUR applied to them.

1 Comment » | Tags: design, Illustrator, poster | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

Stars in Vase - layers of Illustrator

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on February 18th, 2009

starts in vase 1. make a rectangle as the background filled with color blue and applied graphic style ICE TYPE.

2. create a vase by clipping mask a rectangle on an ellipse. and filled the color of gradient white to pink

3. Stems, stars and faces on the stars were created in the order followed by the vase.

No Comments » | Tags: design, Illustrator | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

How can you use dramatic color contrast to improve a design?

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on January 20th, 2009

color_design colorize_elements

Color, the very important element in design, gives a lot of information about what the design work is trying to say. It generates interesting visual effects, creates atmospheres, expresses emotion and feelings, conveys meaning and thus provides guidance to the audiences into the world of the specific design work. Getting multiple colors together, with different values and saturations, creates contrast. And contrast leads to dimension Just like size, shape and position, color tells which objects are in the front, which ones are in the middle and others in the background. The more dramatic difference the colors have, the more obvious dimension we get in the design.

Usually the color with higher value and saturation appear to be closer to the audience then those with lower value and saturation. And combining colors with big difference in value and saturation can result to very distinguished dimensions. Objects with this dimension visual effect tend to appear more outstanding and get more attention. This is because high contrast colors give the distinguished effect of dimension. Examples can be found in the following situation. Increasing the difference between the colors of text and its background to get a dramatic contrast can practically enhance the readability of the type. Therefore, a great color contrast might be used to the main objects in the design for the purpose of making it an outstanding dimension from the background, while the supporting objects are always supposed to be in low color contrast to melt into the background.

The first image is a two-page commercial in the magazine VIA. This is an introduction to the travel agency, who travels mostly to China area, such as Hong Kong. The page uses 2 major colors – Green and Red. These two colors are the complementary in the color scheme. In most design works, they are avoided to be together. It is just like a principle in design field that green doesn’t get along with red. However, in this example of color contrast, the designer used these colors wisely and made the design a successful one. First of all, the color theme in the design is green. The background is light green, and the main object in the front of the photo is fresh green. On the other hand, red, although appear next to green, is not as dominant as green in this design, but just in a supporting role, only showing in the background, out of focus. This way, the green Chinese style of umbrella is standing out of the photo to give a very appealing first sight to the audience.

No Comments » | Tags: color, design, graphics | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

KISS - space

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on November 23rd, 2008

thepiano How can an awareness of negative space improve a graphic design?

White space or space without much variation, saturation or high values is considered as negative space. As part of the graphic design, negative space is equally important as positive space. It won’t attract people’s eyes in the first place, it is used to support the positive space, integrate all the elements in the design and create an environment and atmosphere. As we can see from my creative exercise, image without the negative space, is only displaying a number of objects that has no relationship to each other, which cannot be taken as a design work. Only an image with both negative and positive space can compose a design that has some meaning to tell.

To adjust the amount of the negative space and balance it with the elements is a very important step in the design job. While too much negative space may result to a loose graphic, making the audience hard to receive the message, too little negative space can also result to a cluttered graphic, too intense for the eyes to ease in between each object. The usage of negative space reminds me of the most basic but exclusively important principle of graphic design – KISS (keep it simple stupid). In the field of design, when we say simple, we are referring to fewer objects, less variation and more open space. An adequate amount of white space will make the text legible and graphic components powerful. This also interprets the concept of KISS as “Less is more”.

In a nutshell, a design can never be successful without the balance between negative and positive space and integration of them as well.

No Comments » | Tags: design, graphics | Delicious Stumbleupon Digg

Fall Fantasy - using brush tool in Illustrator

Posted by Jen in design & art, tutorials on November 20th, 2008

When fall is coming, I envision this fall fantacy…

Type:
1.Type: Arial black, 36pt. create outline, use 5pt flat brush.

Applying brushes to path:
2. fall leaf: use the pencil tool to draw some lines, and apply the fall leaf brush on them. Default property of the brush is used.
3. strawberry: use the rectangle tool to draw three rectangles. fill color is none. apply the Strawberry color brush to the stroke of the rectangles. change the brush options as: size 50% - 70% random, spacing 50% - 70% radom, scatter -130% - 27% radom, rotation -75 - 75 random. colorization: hue shift with color of red.
4. ladybug: draw a rectangle around the text. apply ladybug brush on the stroke, with property of: size 80% fixed, spacing 333% - 726% random, scatter -59% - 52% random, rotation -180 - 180 random.

Creating brushes
5. birds: draw three birds with pencil tool. make them into 3 scatter brushes. use line tool and pencil tool to draw path, and apply the bird brush to the path.
bird1: size 20%-100%, spacing 25% - 95%, scatter 2% - 100%, rotation 0 fixed.
bird2: size 10%-64%, spacing 17% - 79%, scatter 2% - 100%, rotation 0.
bird3: size 25% fixed, spacing 36% fixed, scatter 0% fixed, rotation 0.

Using a brush library:
6. Use the graphic sun in celestial stars and sky library, draw a sun at the left up corner.
7. Use the artistic water library, water color stroke1 brush to draw the border.

Background:
8. fill with yellow, use scribble effect.

arrange the order of each object.