heard it through the Grapevine
yeah ….
Archive for the ‘Photoshop’ Category
heard it through the Grapevine
Friday, May 28th, 2010
Whenever I call You
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010Whenever I call You
let’s see …. this is come cool sounds from some cool ladies ..
not a lot of rendering, a little Sorenson Squeeze but … gals get all the credit
Photoshop CS5 likes Camera Raw
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Photoshop CS5 likes Camera RawCamera
Hawk and Dog Creek
Saturday, February 6th, 2010with camera handy, this magnificent Hawk shared a perch with me, taking in his domain, surveying a possible flight, a noble creature, a noble vision
survey the night
Nextgen dogcreek debut with Crystal Snow
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
After Effects Photoshop and Alpha Channels
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009After Effects, Photoshop, and Alpha Channels blend together.
In animation and graphic production we have several tools available to us. Masking, blend mode, lighting all provide their own special way to be able to blend subjects from different sources but an alpha channel absolutely has a magic all it’s own.
When you combine subjects you want your result to be seamless, to look as if these scenes occurred together naturally and using an alpha channel is a very powerful tool to this end. A great exercise for seeing how powerful and basically how easy this can be is to begin with an image in Photoshop,create an alpha channel, then import it into After Effects and view the results.
It is easy to create an alpha channel and there are several tools to assist you, to fine tune your selection, to help you improve your finesse but for me, just seeing the results even on a fairly primitive exercise will make you a believer. We are the ‘instant gratification’ generation, right ?
So let’s create an alpha and see how simply this can work.
Go into Photoshop. Open the image you want to use. Obviously, if there is a nice separation in color and light from the subject you want to extract, it will make the process a bit smoother. Use the selection tools, to highlight the image that will become your ‘alpha’. The quick selection tool is pretty friendly. Click on a representative area, holding down the shift key continue to add more clicking on the area you want to join your selection. You see this area outlined with the famous ‘marching ants’, what appears line a moving marquee of dashed lines outlining your selection. Once you are satisfied with your selection, under the channels window choose the ’save selection’ icon, second from the left.
Save this file as a targa, ‘tga’ file with the ‘alpha channels’ option selected, and you have your image file with new alpha channel defined. Now import this file into After Effects. After Effects will recognize the file type. The import window will state “the item has an unlabeled alpha channel’, stick with the default option of ’straight-unmatted’.
Place your new image with alpha channel with another image, and you will see right away that only the portion you outlined appear. The rectangular outline of the image itself is not visible. You only see the image defined by your alpha channel. This one single technique opens endless possibilities for creating your own blends of images and compositions borne from your imagination. Enjoy !
Photoshop 3d – out of a can ~
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009ok … for all the things we try and tutorials and web sites we scrutinize ….
sometimes something is just waaaaaay too easy and that’s what plotting an animation against a Photoshop 3d shape is.
Thing is, once you’ve created your 3d in Photoshop, when you import it into After Effects with ‘Editable Layer Styles’ and ‘Live Photoshop 3d’ chosen, you immediately inherit the ‘3dness’ of it, it’s attributes and the ability to maneuver with your 3d camera.
Try it. Pick out a picture you like. Go into Photoshop, choose 3D->New Shape From Layer – Photoshop offers cylinders, cubes, spheres, panaroma, heck it offers Wine Bottle.
So … pick one, watch your image immediately map to the shape you’ve chosen. Now, here’s the cool part if that wasn’t cool enough already.
Go into After Effects, import your Photoshop 3d psd, choose ‘Editable Layer Styles’ and ‘Live 3d’. After Effects imports you file creating a layered composition in the process. You’re layered composition will have a 3d camera.
Try it out. Choose the orbit camera tool and view all the angles and perspectives. As you move your camera around, notice it is the position values of the camera that are changing. The animation you create, the wine bottle spinning, the cube tumbling, the panorama you are scanning will be created by entering keyframes in these different position are you scan you camera view about.
Try it out. Waaaay too easy!
After Effects ~ Animate masks …. well kinda ….
Monday, June 1st, 2009I like using real life effects with my effects – so when I wanted to jazz up the sun – adding a sunrise to this logo, I just happened to have some beautiful sunrise footage from Gulf Shores – beautiful. I actually named my clip ‘liquify’ because you could practically see the sun melting into the gulf as it was rising above it.
It turned into an interesting blend of odd tools because starting with my ‘Real sun’ meant calming it down with Mocha tracking. I’m still cutting my teeth on Mocha but basically, you describe the shape you want to stabilize, track it, check the stability as you go and once you are comfortable with the tracking, export your tracking data, paste into After Effects. The only caveats I encountered is, you can track position, scale, rotation, and shear and in this case, a fairly straight ahead view of sun that simply bobbed with my handle. The ’stabilization’ required I paste these new tracking points against the anchor point in AE.
Once you have a stable sunrise, apply a mask in a copy of your composition. If you try to mask your movie, the mask will jump around with the adjusted anchor too – I applied a mask on a solid layer in same comp to see it work – to see movie for masking application, on new solid to see it remain in place.
To bring in a masked alpha image however, you need to create comp from this one, then copy mask over to this new comp that is … a composite of all the elements so far. It sounds a bit complicated, there may be a simpler way but you end up with stabilized, masked comp that you can apply to your ‘real’ job, the logo you are creating, and there
start having more fun. Like applying some sunlike flare and brilliant light … from Knoll light factory. I know of no better way but to experiment a bit, and that’s exactly what I did. I found a ‘desert sun’ flare that blended quite nicely as I let my ‘real Sun’, melt with Knoll flare, into the Illustrator sun logo.
A little bit of work, quite a bit of Fun !
High Def – MTS2 – AVCHD – the future is Wow
Sunday, May 24th, 2009I’ve had quite a time with my first few days of high def, mts2 files,
What is AVCHD? blog postings, and unpredictable results copying files from camera to my pc’s.
However, I do believe the future is now. When your medium is little solid state memory cards, when there is no tape in your camera, when you realize you can read directly from these cards and … but for backup if you have a real project ( vs horsing around now trying to find my way through the mts2 woods)
there really is no need to copy to your hard drive ….
you do … you feel like the future is now.
And we haven’t even gotten to the production part yet.
It’s awkward, and I’ve tried copying everything back and forth on laptop, vista, vista64 – and there are some simple definitions -
CS4 knows AVCHD/mts2 … and well … any previous release … does not.
But is it worth it ? well, in a word, yes. These images are brilliant … and for all the comedy and clumsiness of working through the file types and SDHC memory and USB connections -
there’s a new world of color and defintion for our Web pages.
Lets add a Canon Vixia HF11 to our toolbox
Thursday, May 21st, 2009Lets add a Canon Vixia HF11 to our toolbox
let’s begin avchd High Def, ya dig ?
