Artsnova Digital Art and Space

Desert Reality Inspired Bird House

Looking through my April issue of Rangefinder magazine I came across an interesting profile of photographer Ed Freeman. Titled Desert Reality, the article focuses on the composite images Freeman created and then used for his book Desert Reality. While the photographs appear totally realistic, they are fakes. For Freeman, Adobe Photoshop is as important as his camera because his “photographs” are actually very well done creative composites. The theme is that of unusual or dilapidated buildings, isolated, and placed into a California desert setting. Freeman photographs a building, removes it from its original setting, and then composites it with a desert landscape and an appropriate sky.

One fascinating aspect pointed out in the article is that the background mountain range in all but one image in the book actually came from the same source photograph. Freeman used various Photoshop techniques to alter the appearance of the mountains for each of the images in which it was used.

If you visit the book’s web site, www.desertrealty.org, there is a gallery displaying some of the images from the book. There is also a before and after feature whereby for two of the images from the book you can see the original photograph of the building and then the building as composited into the desert landscape. You may also want to visit Ed Freeman’s web site.

As I was writing this entry, it occurred to me that I would need an appropriate illustration. I went to Imageafter.com to grab a couple stock photos. One of the first pictures I found was of a bird house - that would be my structure. Next was to find an appropriate background. Seeing an image of a stately lawn, I knew that I had my picture. It was a simple task to use Photoshop’s Lasso Tool to isolate the bird house from its background and drag it in as a new layer on the lawn photo. Positioning the bird house slightly back from the central gravel path seemed natural. I then used a combination of the clone stamp and eraser tools and layer masks to blend the base of the house with the gravel path. The final step was to create a shadow layer for the bird house so that its lighting would match the shadows being cast by the trees to the left. One thing I thought of doing but didn’t was to enlarge the bird hole and add a sign “Beware of Bird.”

Just one more example of how Photoshop can be the digital photographer’s best friend.

Ad Astra, Jim

The Me Sphere Rendered Using Pandromeda Mojoworld

Last time I wrote about my first submission to The Sphere Project at CGSphere.com. My submission was titled Puzzle Sphere. I have since yanked that submission and replaced it with a new one more to my liking.

Titled The Me Sphere, this new submission uses as the sphere’s material a portrait of myself processed using Adobe Photoshop, a transparency map created in Photoshop, and finally rendered using Pandromeda’s Mojoworld.

The two most interesting aspects of this project were creating the texture and working with the scene lighting. For the texture I took a photograph of myself that I had handy on my hard drive and began to experiment using Photoshop. I went through several iterations to achieve the affect I desired. Next was working with the lighting in Mojoworld. In my original Puzzle Sphere submission, I used the Mojoworld Sun as the lighting source. For this submission I substituted a special effects light with a gel applied to get the multicolored lighting.

I must confess that I find The Me Sphere much more appealing than the Puzzle Sphere - I hope you do to. So go check out The Me Sphere - before I pull it and replace it with something else.

Ad Astra, Jim

This is not a tutorial. It is a Not Tutorial. Confused? Hopefully it will all be clear by the time I’m done. More than once I have come across tutorials on how to use Photoshop to create planetary rings. In fact since this is totally Photoshop specific, it will serve as the inaugural posting to a new topic section devoted to Photoshop. While I have mentioned Adobe Photoshop in several previous postings, I have never gone into sufficient detail to warrant creating a Photoshop category - until now.

Back to planetary rings and Photoshop: there is a widely prescribed method for creating rings which I call the swirly clouds method because it relies on Photoshop’s Twirl Tool. Let me give you a quick run through of how these tutorials proceed. We’re not going to worry about the planet. Our focus is on the ring system and how it gets created.

1. Start up Photoshop.
2. Create a 1000 by 1000 pixel document.
3. Fill the background layer with black.
4. Create a new layer named Rings.
5. Make the Rings layer the active layer.
6. Filter -> Render -> Clouds
7. Filter -> Distort -> Twirl using an angle of 999°. Repeat two more times.
8. Activate the Elliptical Marquee Tool
9. Position your cursor at the center of the document and click-Alt-Shift to create a centered perfectly circular selection. Drag to the desired inner boundary for your rings, release, and press the Delete key to remove the inner swirly area.
10. Position your cursor at the center of the document and click-Alt-Shift to create a centered perfectly circular selection. Drag to the desired outer boundary for your rings, release, press Shift-Ctrl-I to invert the selection, and press the Delete key to remove the outer swirly area.
11. Ctrl-T to activate the Transform tool. Flatten and tilt to create the perspective you want for your planet’s rings.

And that’s all there is to it. Note that following step 10 you could have added noise, color, whatever. Not bad for five minutes work.
But there is a problem, especially if you want your rings to be big. Take a close look at the rings that you have just created and at the rings in the picture below.

The red dots mark points where the rings appear out of nothing and disappear into nothing. These points are a direct result of using Photoshop’s Twirl Tool to create a circular material. Granted they are not very noticeable but they are noticeable and not at all realistic. Real rings just don’t work like that. While there may not be a quicker way to create rings for your planets, there are better ways.

My advice is if you are serious about your planet’s rings and your rings are going to be large and you come across a Photoshop tutorial that expounds the basic twirly ring methodology: ignore it. Having said that, I will point out that the rings used to illustrate this “not” tutorial were made using the swirly rings method.

Note: It has come to my attention that Internet Explorer is unable to display the numbers for the ordered list used to identify the individual steps in the tutorial. Obviously IE is developmentally challenged. Firefox has no difficulty displaying the numbers

Ad Astra, Jim