Photoshop 004 – The lining’s on the wall

OK, today I’ll let you in on the steps to create stunning, simple art you can print and hang like a wall painting. A few posts back *click*, we turned a meat platter into a colorful wall piece (once it is printed and mounted, that is). You won’t get the same results twice so it’s easy to see how this can hook you. And below, the samples are from photos of a Christmas cake, a fast-food mascot, and a heart-shaped waffle. How can you make your own? Here’s how.

#1 – Choose a photo that’s relatively colorful or vibrant. You can also choose a picture with colors of the same hue. It’s really up to you.  There is no hard rule for this first step.
#2 – Choose a part of the photo where you will make your marquee selection. You will be making a selection from the top of the photo all the way down to the bottom.
#3 –  On the left-hand toolbox, choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool to make your selection on your photo. It should only be a few pixels wide. Make sure the style is at Normal and not at a Fixed Ratio.

 

 

#4 – Jopy after you make your selection.
#5 – Press CTRL+T to use Transform on the selection. Drag each side of the bounding box to and even over the photo’s outermost edges. This drags or stretches the photo so that lines of the color come out.
#6 – Crop a square section of what you’ve transformed.
#7 – Jopy then filter the new layer. Click on Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter an amount of 5.0 pixels.
#8 – In the Layers panel (right-side menu items), change the Blend Mode to Soft Light. You can experiment on different modes that suit your mood.
#9 – Finally in the Adjustments panel (above the Layers panel), modify any adjustment to your heart’s content. You can start with the Curves adjustment and plot curve points and see as your art’s colors change.

Done! Post replies with what you’ve created.  Below are the three samples.

The Feast

Wow. It has literally been decades since I went to a  Christian worship gathering like this outside of the usual Church venue. When I was young, my aunt and grandmother would take me to Amoranto stadium (or some other stadium I forgot) because I had been sickly and they were praying for me. Today, even though I slept at 2am, I woke up at 5:30am. I was amazed myself – I usually wake up at 8am. Upon a friend’s invite I went to PICC and attended the 8am mass. And wow again- great production value! There was a choir that clapped, a group of soloists on stage, a band, a string quartet, several cameras (even a camera at the end of a boom) and a sign-language person. It was amusing to see ushers and usherettes wearing crazy hats like cardboard birthday hats and jingle-y jester hats. Oh, I have to mention the songs: the opening song was upbeat, the rest were pop-sounding too. And then the mass itself was alright and the homily was not too dreary. So it was a refreshing experience. I had a prayer: that anger and frustration leave me. Snap- still there. Snap- still there. Snap- stil- nice, not there anymore. Ahwehwehwe. Seriously, I’m glad I went. I wish there would be a similar venue near Cubao so I could attend more often. I left after the blessing. There would be a talk after- a minster. Bo Sanchez I think. Charming looking fellow whose image occupied half of the front page of their newsletter handout. I’m sure he’s just as charming and convincing when he talks. I’m extremely happy that a lot of people still go to mass and have a relationship with God. To God be the greater glory!

Englis Polise 8: Typo

We have some basic typos today.
Stragglers from last year. We’ll find fresh new botches this year.
Typo?
There will always be typos.
No, I – never mind. 

You were taught proper English when you were young, I am not too hopeful.

Oh! Oh! Whose for who’s is a common mistake.
Much to be desired, feces.
Apologies. =(
OK, the next three are from marketing people (Read: people looking for a job placed in positions they are not qualified for (Snap!)) I suppose.

 No writing skills needed?

Hey yourself! Firstest of all, I don’t care.

Delecius, maybe, but NOT fabolous. 

Make art from your photos

You can turn any photo into a work of art to hang on your wall! See this picture of a meat and cheese platter? Take it from that to this. It’s very simple to do.  I’ll tell you how to turn any photo into something like this on the next Photo Ops post.

Photoshop 003 – Blurred is smooth

You’re tired and just want to get through fixing your photo up. You can just blur it and the problems (problem areas) go away! Large pores? Blur everything. Crow’s feet? Blur everything. Oiliness? Bags? Don’t get carried away. Like they say: “How can you solve a problem if the problem is your face?” Ahwehwehwe. Well, you can try blurring it. Those with poor eyesight see differently. And sometimes, not seeing clearly can be a blessing.

Blurring isn’t the answer to everything, mind you. It’s one technique you can use to quickly “beautify” a photo. No need for specific tools and doing steps one at a time. However you still have to be careful not to apply too much Blur or the photo won’t look nice at all.

So here’s what we do:
1) Open your photo in Photoshop
2) “Jopy” your main layer (While selecting the main layer or background, press CTRL+J – this will create a new layer from the active selection).
3) Next select your copy layer and you can rename it as “High Pass” or “Blur”.
4) Set the Blend Mode (On the left of the Opacity setting bar) to Overlay.
5) Press CTRL+I.
6) Check that the High Pass filter is set to 10 pixels. Do that by going to the Menu bar on top and selecting Filter > Other > High Pass.
7) And then set the Gaussian Blur to 2 or 3 depending on how blurred you like it.
8) Finally, adjust the Opacity setting. Below is the output with 100% Opacity.

Johnny’s @ Eastwood Cybermall

I ate rice today! Fried rice! And it’s a good day to start, being the first day of the new year, to really gain some weight. You read it right. I have to get back to at least 150 pounds. And then move up to 160 maybe? And hopefully it all won’t go to my gut! Yesterday, I had breakfast and snacks too but I still was only up to 66% RDI. Today, I skipped breakfast and did my exercise routine and I’m up to 106% IF I finish 4 slices of pizza. Burning 2,000-2500 calories a day with work and my exercise, I need to get as much calories! (I pretend I’m an expert at this.)

Baby steps, baby steps. In a couple of months I should gain 10 pounds at least. Sooner if I’m lucky to not skip any meal. So, lunch was this little resto at the third floor of the Eastwood Cybermall.

The “fried” of Marikina. Ha! OK. The counter where you order and pay greets you at the entrance. The attendant goes missing once in a while, going to the backroom or somewhere. One time, a cook calls out to her because there was a customer looking at the wall-mounted menu. She arrives as the customer leaves.

I ordered a longganisa breakfast meal with Fried rice and fried egg, a quarter piece of fried chicken, and an extra egg. Iced tea for beverage.

(I just finished 3 and a half slices of regular Bacon Cheeseburger pizza and I’m not feeling all too well. I wasn’t that hungry yet but I forced myself to eat.) OK, and here’s their fried chicken. All in all, it was tasty enough and satisfying. Banana ketchup so I’m good there. Prices were reasonable and affordable so if you’re in the area wanting some “home-y” fried stuff, check out Marikina’s “fried”.

Photoshop 002 – Lighten Eye-bags

This may be a bit more tricky unless you have the perfect brush for it, or unless you have a light pen and pad so that you won’t need to use the clunky mouse controls for this particular task. But let’s make do.

So, eye-bags. We all get it, right? One night, you’re partying or at the office on U.S. hours calls, the next morning whether you’ve slept or not, they appear- eye-bags. They know what you did last night! And they remind you of it whenever you look in the mirror. Tough luck, it’s head-shot day and foundation has run out! What to do?! Nothing. Let Photoshop handle it. You can erase it altogether but that could be another lesson another day. And you may end up looking unnaturally well-rested. So we just lighten it so you won’t look too worn out.

Tool of choice: Clone Stamp tool

Steps:
#1 Open your photo in Photoshop
#2 You may want to do some spot healing first
#3 On the top menu bar, select Layer > New > Layer or click Shift+CTRL+N. You can name the new transparent layer descriptively like “Lighten bags”.
#4 On the toolbar on the left, click on the Clone Stamp tool (see image above).
#5 In the Layer Properties box (lower-right corner of the screen), pull down the Effect Mode and change it from Normal to Lighten.
#6 Still in the Layer Properties box, change the Opacity % to a number between 30-35. You can adjust this later on depending on your preference.
#7 Select the original picture layer
#8 Holding down the Alt key (the pointer will become a cross-hair tip), click on a part of the picture that is lighter-colored than the eye-bags you’d like to lighten. This would take that lighter shade into memory and use it when you brush it on top of the eye-bags. At least that’s how I understand it.
#9 Back to the new layer, brush on top of the eye-bags to lighten them. Adjust the brush size/tip accordingly.
#10 There may be rough edges so you can use the Blur or the Smudge tools to fix that.

All better, light- er, I mean, right?!

Photoshop 001 – Spot Healing

That’s pretty basic, right? Doing portraiture, you’d like the photos to be blemish-free, smooth, and flawless. Yes, make-up helps; but there are things make-up can’t hide. And what if the subject didn’t wear make-up or only wears light make-up? Enter Photoshop or some other program that hides or fixes these small imperfections. OK, let’s start.

I’m using Photoshop CS4.  And on this lesson, we work on this photo. As you can see, we’d like to clean up the model’s upper body. On her arm, there’s also a marking left by an injection possibly. We’d like to get rid of that too.

Tool of choice: Spot Healing Brush Tool

Steps:
1) Open your photo in Photoshop
2) While selecting the main layer or background, press CTRL+J – this will create a new layer from the active selection (or duplicates the selected layer)

You don’t really have to create a duplicate layer on top of the main one. You can work on the main one right away. But if you’d like to be able to keep the original so you can see the before and after once you’re done, this will let you do that.  Plus you’ll be able to wipe away all your edits with just a delete-layer command and start over. CTRL+J is your friend. Let’s name him “Jopy” (dja-pee) ‘coz he copies but he’s not CTRL+C.

3) Next select your copy layer and you can rename it as “Spot Healing” so you know what you’re doing with that particular layer.
4) On the toolbar on the left, click on the Spot Healing Brush tool (see image above).
5) Spot heal away! You can adjust the size of your brush tip so it’s large enough for the blemishes that you have to heal.

When you’re done, you can toggle making your Spot Healing layer invisible and visible to see the difference between the original picture.

And here’s the after. “Spot” the difference.

Englis Polise 7: Huh? Stress!

Must be a god. Imagine his abs. Or her. Or legs.
Gods don’t carry houses on their backs, nor on their backpacks.

Now this is a common mistake.
Still.

And second, he has trouble spelling.
Or the ‘e’ got bored and moved on down beside ‘m.

OK, for this one, weather you read it or hear it, it’ll making you cringe.
You’ll learning!

Photoshop 000

Three Sundays ago, I got a DSLR, a Nikon D3100. Red. Very nice. It would have been better if it came in the colors below (courtesy of Photo Crumble — see side bar) but red is good enough for now. Two Sundays ago, I attended a workshop where we took photos of models and the instructor tried to explain how to do post-processing in Photoshop. The 3-hour walking-around-taking-pictures-of-models was tiring but productive. The next day, it took 3 hours for the instructor to set up his desktop and projector and copy files onto flash disks. Fail! And so I played with Photoshop by myself that afternoon and thought I could probably just study by myself. There’s a vast sea of information and resources in the internet for those who want to learn Photoshop. So I’ll take it upon myself to learn, albeit slowly, from any material I can find and post what I learn here in my blog under the category “Photo Ops”. Sound good? Makes sense? Alright? Ahwehwehwe

Here’s the red Nikon D3100. I got a 35mm lens and a 70-300 AS lens along with the 18-55mm kit. I’ll be getting a battery grip and a couple of Speedlights and maybe a Macro LED to complete my set for taking {Curious Portraits}.

And here are the various flavors I wish the D3100 came out with. (It’s from Photo Crumble so be sure to visit that blog!)
Right? And here’s the below-and-after of my playing around with Photoshop at the workshop two Sundays ago. Oh, so for now, if I can do it, I’m quite fine taking nice photos/portraits the first time and retouch only slightly.
Feel free to critique. Model here is the pretty Aiko Hayashida. You’ll be seeing more of her when I start my basic Photoshop lessons.

Happy Halloween!

Seen in the metro – kids in costumes. And this one has an excitedly energetic vehicle ramming into a nun. Ramming into a nun – that’s not too nice!

More ‘bleh’ than Glee

Yeah, that was my reaction too. I feel this could well be the last season for this show unless something exciting happens that will help the show roll-over to another season. The leads will graduate and the group will finally win Nationals and Sue Sylvester will have a blood vein burst somewhere in her. What’s next? Will Mercedes slim down? Who will follow the exit of trouty-mouth Sam and Puck-lover Lauren? Who will hook up next? Will Brittany graduate? Will we see yellow pianos? At least Blaine’s at the same school as Kurt is. Good ol’ wacky-cool-dressing Blaine whose song number was how the cheerleaders torched one of the Barney pianos. Oh, and is Quinn’s hair the side effect of getting it on with Number Four? Hee-hee. Let’s see what reaction we get from the next episode, shall we? Yeah, I didn’t think you’d enjoy sitting on the fence that much.

Animal Man #1

The comic starts out with an interview with Buddy Baker, Animal Man. Who’s doing the interview? Jeff Lemire, the series writer. Fun! Introducing the character to readers who might not know who Animal Man is and what he’s been through in the past is good although it was rather lengthy.
I loved the facial expressions drawn by artist Travel Foreman: Ellen, the wife, pouting; Maxine shouting; Ellen with eyes wide – they were all precious! I loved Animal Man’s landing too at the scene where the hostage-taking was. The plot moved along quite decently– Animal Man used his powers and then he bled from his eyes, and then he had a dream of his son with intestines hanging out of his open stomach, and Maxine was trying to hide in a river of blood from the villains (?). The ending scene makes me want to get a hold of the 2nd issue now! What will happen to Maxine and her “friends”? =)

The good: For me, the art was good. It looked like the book could have been a Vertigo book.
The bad: The long interview-style opening introduction.
The ugly: The villains (?) were pretty creepy-ugly!

Will I get issue two next month? Still thinking about it; right now, I’m on the fence. How long will the first arc be?