Vector Desktop Background (1600x900)

   This post was originally supposed to be my current project, however, I wanted to wait for the piece to be done and presentation-worthy before I put it up to the world. Anyways, I made this background just this evening using Illustrator for the lines and Photoshop for glow effects. All the glows are layer styles so the color and intensity are completely editable. This year I really want to focus on non-destructive editing, a skill that would have saved me a lot of time last school year. The piece is in a 16:9 aspect ratio so it should display nicely on most modern monitors.
Enjoy!

Out of Place Eagle

The goal of this project was to design a piece where an eagle wouldn't be found in nature. Most of my work was done just this night and I've been working on other software and familiarizing myself with cg. Never the less, I wanted this to be one of my better pieces. I included many small details like the eagles in the background, the triple eye, and the selective color to give the piece more to look out without being overpowering.

Selective Color

This is an easy piece I made by using a technique to achieve selective color. Most people always make the background desaturated while keeping the subject saturated. I wanted to go out of the box by making the subject desaturated forcing the eye to be drawn to the out of focus background which draws the eye back towards the desatuated flowers.  Some choose to go about this using Color Range, Fuzziness, Range, Etc. but this way is far easier. The only adjustment you need a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer with a Layer mask of the area. The layer mask can be achieved by using the Quick Selection Tool while painting over the missed parts with the brush tool. This creates much better results than other methods. Although, the desaturation wasn't the only adjustment I made. I also added a Curves Layer in order to correct the background color along with a layer technique involving setting one white and one black layer on certain blending modes in order to increase shadows and highlights.

PS Actions

This piece was made from a normal picture of mushrooms which I then darkened the corners using an action I made. Then, I added a orangey-yellow layer that I then lowered the opacity on to give a sepia effect. Lastly, I added some noise and slight blur to the photo to make it look lomographic.

Easy Stainless Steel Background Tutorial

While working on a piece in photoshop, I stumbled a across an easy, and quick way to create a stainless steel background. In this tutorial, I'll show you my method.

1. Make a document about 50 pixels greater than your intended width for your document. Make the hight your intended hight. If you are using the image for web, 72 ppx is fine; for print, 300 works best.

2. Choose a light grey for your foundation of your background. If you feel the grey is too dark or too light, don't worry we'll fix it later.

3. Add some noise to your image to give us something to work with in making the background. I recommend the setting I used below.

4. To make the "grain" of the stainless steel, we are going to add a motion blur to the image. 

5. You'll notice that the left and right sides or your image are a little frayed. To fix this, go under Image ---> Canvas Size and adjust the width down to the intended size of your background. This is why we added the extra 50 pixels.

You could stop here but to add some variation to the background, add the noise and motion blur again using slightly different setting to get a better result. Also, if your image was too dark/light, add a Brightness and Contrast layer and play with the brightness slider until you're happy.

Final Result:

Enjoy.

Color Replacement Tool

Using the color replacement tool, I was able to take this flower and replace it with a designated foreground color without producing a choppy or blocky result. Normally, I would just use a Hue and Saturation set to Colorize with a layer mask but this method is far quicker.

Adobe Illustrator: Twirl Tool

   Lately, I've been trying out the features of Adobe Illustrator and what it has to offer. Illustrator is a vector based program in which graphics are made. Photoshop has limited vector capabilities such as shapes but Illustrator picks up where Photoshop left off. So far, I've mainly been using the twirl tool. I made this piece using the tool then imported the vector into Photoshop to make this 1600x900 background.