*~Here's How I Did That... Tips and Tricks~*

Ok I normally just PM someone an answer like this but I've been asked about shadows a couple times and I got
a request to make a separate tip thread for it so here we go, I'll share my tip for making shadows
and if you have a cool tip or trick to share now there is a place to do it.
Have at it.

Note: While I've been using photoshop for many years it was just to edit photo's and make web content never to create art/digitally
color so bear in mind I'm no PS guru and there are probably different/better ways to do this but I'll give all ya peeps a
quick outline of one decent way I've found to make quick easy shadows. I call this the "knock over" method.


1st separate the object (in this case a drawing I did of Kai's WyldeFyre) onto it's own layer with no background then duplicate it.
**Bonus Tip** with a high contrast background you can use the magic wand tool to quickly select the white space and
then up in the menu choose "Select --> Invert" to select just the object then Ctrl+J to do this quickly.


2nd can name that layer (I left it layer1 nyah nyah ) and color it black/darken it completely to get a shadow copy of your image like this.
**Bonus Tip** you can quickly blacken it by hitting Ctrl+U and moving the "Lightness" slider all the way to the left.



3rd use Free Transform (Ctrl+T) or the warping tool of your preference to "knock over" the shadow layer onto the ground/wall.
**Bonus Tip** if using FT to knock over it helps to hold down your control key (ctrl) when
doing so as this lets you manipulate the points individually.



4th set it's Opacity to about 88% so it's not too dark and then go to Filter --> Blur --> Gaussian Blur and set to about 6% to soften it.
**Bonus Tip** If you want to get all rich and fancible (yay Firefly!) you can use a gradient to make it darker near her feet and
lighter as it gets further away as I did here. To do that I clicked the Gradient tool and then left-clicked between her
feet to plot the first point, then I dragged the line up by the head of her shadow released it. If it doesn't
look quite right hit Ctrl+Z (undo) and repeat until you get a result you are satisfied with.


That's it, enjoy!

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

One of the best tips I've ever gotten about Photoshop was to set up a light source on my top most level that would act like an overhead lamp. In the real world, if you're detailing your Warhammer models, or you're a beader and you're making jewelry or you're making your own flies for fly fishing, you want to be working under a bright light so you can see what you're doing. When working with layers in Photoshop you're going to want your workspace to provide more then enough light to see what you're doing.



For example here's a screengrab of a Tellus from the game. As you can see it's a real dark image, and at some point I'm going to have brighten it before I can use it for anything. The trick is to not brighten the image itself until the last couple steps of your project. You can head to image/adjustments/color-brightnesss and lighten the image up right off the bat. The problem is you may end up losing color information and contrast that you may want to have during the final steps of your project.

I'm gonna show you a quick and easy way to get a layer to act as an overhead lamp so you have a properly illuminated workspace.



First step is to create a new layer and all you have to do is click the that little button my arrow is pointing at. Now the layer is blank so we need to fill it with white.



I'm showing my toolbar in this photo, and the yellow circle show which colors you have loaded. Black - White is the default color setup and to quickly fill my new layer with white I just need to hit ctrl + backspace. As you can see I now have a solid white layer above my image. We now need to change the blend mode of this solid white layer so it illuminates the image and doesn't hide it.
*Alt Backspace will fill the new layer with the foreground color (in this case black), Crtl Backspace will fill a selection with the background color (in this case white)



Making sure the solid white layer is selected, go up into the blend drop down menu and pick Soft Light. This blend mode will flood any layers below it with a soft diffused white that will really brighten up an image.



In this image I've deleted a lot of the white layer on the left side of the image, just to show you the difference this makes. The nice thing about using a soft light layer like this is you can turn the visablity of that layer on and off with one click, and at the same time keep the original color and contrast information for later use.

If you've ever taken a picture of something with your digital camera and you wish you had used the flash, try this technique. You can adjust the opacity of the soft light layer if the artificial flash is too bright.

Hopefully my simple trick isn't too confusing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ChristopherRobin
If you got any good tips you've picked up for GIMP by all means add those to the thread as well, not everyone has PhotoShop.

I'd be interested to know how you did those convincing ice cubes when you
colored Lady Cyrsei's gift art of the Sub Zero Man.

Sure, altho there was no in-house effects used to make those, i just manually coloured them. Basically i saw that ice (and glass i guess, any transparent material) seems to reverse the normal rules of reflecting light. A solid cube would be lightest on the face towards the light, darker on the far face, whereas transparent shapes seem the opposite.

I decided i could see 3 colours in an ice cube when placed infront of a blue background (as i knew i was going to colour the background blue in the piece). They were blues, greens and greys.



I'm sure there's other methods to acheive this result, but this works for me atm. Remember your colour of background will effect the colours you use, as you're essentially seeing the background defracted through the ice. Hope it helps.

cheers H.

Does anyone have tips&tricks about creating fire?

*waves*
DeeDee

CoH Fan-Art Sale still several slots open!

Read my in-game stories and check out my DeviantART page.
- coXso - It was a memorable time filled with art!

matches?

sorry, heh, i've just left a few comments on your other post.

I tried matches the first time... but they ruined my computer!

CoH Fan-Art Sale still several slots open!

Read my in-game stories and check out my DeviantART page.
- coXso - It was a memorable time filled with art!

Great tips so far! Thanks muchly for posting them!

(hum! no, I aint got any to share, yet, myself)

Open an 800x800 document. In the Layers Tab click the New Fill button (its in blue) and select Gradient.



Make sure your settings are as below. The proper gradient probably won't come up, In blue you'll find the drop down menu to choose the correct gradient.



Choose the circled gradiant.



Now you've just filled your document with a new Fill Layer. Circled in Black is our gradient but it needs to be rasterized before we can shape it the way we want. Circled in Red is a Layer Mask. Normally I just drag the Layer Mask to my trashcan but we are going to need it in a second to finish the rainbow.
To the Right of the Layer Mask right click and choose Rasterize Layer.



Grab your Move Tool (Crtl V) and resize the top and the bottom of the rainbow but leave the rainbow touching the left and right sides. Experiment with thickness but it's hard to mess this up. When you have the size you want hit Enter to commit to the shape change.



We need to add a filter to turn this rectangle to a circle. Go to your Filters Tab and go Distort - Polar Cordintes.



Make sure you have Rectangular to Polar selected and click OK.



So we have a full circle Rainbow but I only need the top half. There are many ways I can delete the half I don't need but I want the bottom of my rainbow to fade slightly. We are going to use the Layer Mask to do this.

1. Click inside the layer mask.
2. Make sure your foreground color is black and your background color is white.
3. Pick your Gradient Tool. The Gradient Tool shares a button with the Paintbucket Tool. Right clicking allows you to swap back and forth between them.
4. From the Gradient drop down menu choose the Black to White Gradient.
5. Make sure you have the Liner Gradient selected.



Now that we now everything is set up for this Layer Mask we need to start our gradient. The black dot in this photo is where we want to start the gradient. We want to hide the rainbow starting at the point it starts to circle back on itself. We want the Gradient to head straight up. If you hold down the Shift Key you'll only be able to draw a gradient in a straight line. You can keep repeating this step over and over till you get a look that works.



If everything went right you should be looking at half a rainbow with a soft fade at the bottom.



Even if you don't need Rainbows I hope someone can make use of the quick circle technique and understands the basics of using a Layer Mask to make part of an image transparent.

For Pisces I used a pair of quick white circles and the Motion Blur to imply velocity.

For Tellus I used the quick circles and the Vanishing Point filter. The Vanishing Point filter is sorta like Skew on crack. It's going to take some practice.

Draw-over
As I was messing around with Paint Shop Pro 9 I wondered if I would be able to colour one of my first CoX related drawings one day. But all those drawings are already shaded with pencil. I didn't scan it when it was still line-art. Ofcourse I didn't wanna go around erasing all the work I'd done.

Then I thought..well, I might as well try and copy it myself.
Decreasing the colours to Black and White only doesn't work. You'll end up erasing billions of pixels, which takes ages to get right.

So I made use of the "visible-function" of a layer in PSP.
I put the original scan as a "background" layer. Then added a new layer (transparent or white, doesn't matter) and put that visibility at 66% (you can do as you please of course).
That gives me the opportunity to draw over my old drawings, ending up with the lines only .

As DarthDelicious's face in the original drawing didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it to, I changed that with the draw over... because I can!

Anyways... no need to redraw old stuff, just simply draw over!
Works for Photoshop aswell

I thought I'd share that with you lot.
Enjoy!

*waves*
DeeDee

CoH Fan-Art Sale still several slots open!

Read my in-game stories and check out my DeviantART page.
- coXso - It was a memorable time filled with art!

I would have commented sooner, but new job started Tuesday.

But...

YAY! on Tips and Tricks thread.

I've really just started, but I've already been using the draw-over quite a bit to get clean lines of my sketches.

For those medieval types - chainmaille!

And this is how I make auras

trying to make some basic vids but I have mic lag, if you guys wouldn't mind the mic lag let me know and I'll put them up
It's just some simple coloring a drawing in photoshop

Edit problem solved btu as to not have to repeat the painting example I just did some commentary instead.
Whoo.
Here is the image:


Here is the video

Cool, thanks for the quick setup tutorial Cami, I picked up a thing or two
(used multiply all the time on brushs but not for a layer mode with my pencils) while watching this.

Are you going to finish up the coloring (I'd love to see it) or was this just for instructional purpose?

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

Though I use a different program, I learned quite a bit aswell Thanks Cami!

*waves*
DeeDee

CoH Fan-Art Sale still several slots open!

Read my in-game stories and check out my DeviantART page.
- coXso - It was a memorable time filled with art!