Faking Tilt Shift Photography with a Painting

Design Something Every Day 31 of 365

I saw these amazing images that used a faked version of tilt shift photography on some paintings by Vincent Van Gogh. These great images were created by Mathieu S of theswedishbed.com. I thought it was a cool idea to use a technique that is typically used on a photograph and use it on a traditional painting instead. Tilt shift photography is a style that by using a special lens, makes a photograph of  the real world look like it’s a model (see here). When it’s used on a painting,  I think it looks like a pop-up book.

Above is my first attempt at this technique using this painting by the French Impressionist Camille Pissarro. I’ll post some more of my experiments, leading to an actual tutorial to give my thoughts.

In the mean time these are good tutorials about how to achieve this effect. The technique relys on blurring parts of the image and tweaking the saturation and levels. My quick tip that I’d add is to  keep a non-blurred layer underneath the blurred layer, then use a layer mask on the blurred layer to to give more control over what you want the viewer to focus on, more on that later.

tiltshiftphotography.net

Visual Photoguide: how to make a fake miniature

Also here’s a cool video that combines tilt shift photography and adds in stop motion for a tilt shift video of Disneyworld. That’s pretty cool if you ask me.

Adobe PhotoShop (really) Quick Tips

Adobe PhotoShop Really Quick Tip Here’s a handy little keyboard shortcut I learned from Deke McClelland, master of all things digital imaging. This little tip is pretty handy when you want to experiment with layer blending modes on the fly.

As long as you have don’t have the brush, healing, gradient, blurring or dodge/burn tools active you can use a keyboard short cut to cycle forwards and backwards through the layer blend modes. The short cut is (for both Mac & PC):

shift + + (plus key) or shift + – (minus key)

If you had any of the other tools active, the same keyboard shortcut cycles through the active tool’s blending mode, which can be pretty handy too.

The Essential Approach to Masking with Deke McClelland

Masking an image is one of the most difficult things to do convincingly in Photoshop. If you are interested in effective masking techniques, you need to watch this video! In it you will be guided by PhotoShop guru Deke McClelland and given the best principles for masking in PhotoShop. It’s almost like an entire lynda.com course in 29 min. Most surprisingly you’ll discover that the most powerful principle of  masking is not “dopey selection tools,” but:

…the art of having an image select itself.

If you don’t believe me, watch Master Deke and be amazed…

This video is an oldie but a goody, and came from Photoshop Guru Deke McClelland being guest blogger for fellow  Guru Scott Kelby on his great blog about all things Photoshop scottkelby.com.

Updated Free Survivor Tribal Color Swatches for Illustrator and Photoshop

Another season of Survivor, my favorite television show, has run its course. In a surprise to me and most of the fans of the show, the conniving and brilliant tactician Russell Hantz won everything but the game, being defeated in a lopsided vote to Natalie White (link). I guess that Survivor can be like chess, in that you can be a brilliant tactician, but if your strategy is flawed then even being up in material and position, you can still be mated.  For more about my strange obsession with this show, I refer you to my last post with the topic here.

In honor of another great season I thought I’d update my Survivor tribal color swatches for the Adobe Creative Suite, they are in the Adobe Swatch Exchange format (.ase). They are now updated and include the tribal colors for the previous two seasons of Survivor, Tocantins & Samoa .

Click here to download the free color swatches.

Also, today is the winter solstice and is officially the first day of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. In Seattle the rain has been pouring for weeks if not months already. However, thanks to Survivor and Herman Melville I have been transported to the lush and mysterious islands of the South Pacific.  I have begun reading a classic in the field of popularizing and mythologizing (for good and ill) the world  of Polynesia, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Herman Melville (for some reason I’ve also seen it subtitled in some editions as A Peep at Polynesian Life).

Long before Melville had his readers chase a great white whale, he marooned them on more temperate shores. This book is a highly fictionalized account of some of the true adventures Melville had as a young sailor when he jumped ship and lived with the natives of Marquesas Islands for three weeks in 1842. Coincidentally , the Marquesas played host to a season of Survivor (Season 4).

Scholarship is divided on the merits of Typee as a work of literature and especially his portrayal of the native islanders. I find it interesting that even though Melville is now known primarily for Moby Dick, this was by far his most successful work during his life time.  I think that is because this book is at its heart an adventure story of escape in a lush and mysterious land. Which is the underlying mythology of the western view of the South Seas, something that Survivor and Polynesian Pop has coursing through their bloodstream. To end here is a quote from Typee that sums this mythology perfectly:

‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!’ The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoanut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—HEATHENISH RITES AND HUMAN SACRIFICES.

For more information

Online Versions of Typee:

• Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1900
• Libravox.org audio book: http://librivox.org/typee-by-herman-melville/

More about Typee:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typee
• Sparks Notes (no cheating, just reference… read the book!) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/typee/

More about Herman Melville & some of his other works:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
• http://www.melville.org/
• http://www.mobydick.org/

Survivor:

• http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor

More about Adobe .ase format:

• http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/04/adobe-swatch-exchange-ase-files.html
• http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html

The New Yorker cover created on an iPhone

The New Yorker Magazine has a tradition of excellent, challenging and often times controversial covers for its weekly magazine. This was evident during the previous American election, with two covers illustrating the stereotypes of both candidates (see here and here). The propriety and tastefulness of the covers created something of a political firestorm, or at least in media circles. It gave the media a chance to feign indignation, point fingers, and flog one if their own, something that seems to be great sport amongst the fifth estate. Of course, the Daily Show had the most rational and hilarious take on the controversy see here.

Politically the New Yorker takes risks not only in content, but also in style and technique.  I admire the way their editors and art directors take chances and have cover illustrations not only by a wide assortment of artists using a staggering assortment of medium; from oils or watercolors,  pen and ink, even the amazing illustrations of Bob Staake created using the 3.0 version of Photoshop (the latest version of the program is 11).  Now we can add the Apple iPhone to such august company.

The current issue features a cover created by illustrator and designer Jorge Colombo. It’s pretty amazing, he drew the cover using Brushes, an application for his iPhone. According to the New Yorker he drew it while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Which I find a delightfully quirky and surreal factoid for some reason.  Watch him creating his cover below:

Seeing Colombo’s fantastic work being created on a simple iPhone app and the work that Staake can do using only Photoshop 3.0 is pretty amazing. It should reinforce the point that computers and software mere are tools, powerful and great tools to be sure, but they exist only in service of some other purpose. In this case we should not  be blinded by the technology and forget the meaning of the art. Photoshop, iPhones and their ilk are wildly different that the primitive brushes of the Lascaux caves, but are singular in that they are means to an end, the creation of art. I need to remind myself of this when I obsessively pour over the latest tutorials on PSD Tuts or slobber over the newest bells and whistles in the next Adobe release. Photoshop is a wicked tool, but still just a tool.

via Gabriel Campanario / Urban Sketchers

If your interested check out these related links:

• The New Yorker article on the cover read it here…
• iPhone Brushes Flickr Group, it is pretty amazing. here…
• Jorge Colombo’s Website here…
• ABC News interviews Jorge Colombo here…
• Bob Staake’s Website here…
• More Bob Staake illustration techniques on YouTube here…
• Peruse the Covers of The New Yorker Magazine for inspiration. Search the archives here…

Twitter Background Templates for Illustator & Photoshop

Twitter is all the rage, but how can you make a great looking twitter page? Twitter gives the user limited, yet flexible design options. As social networking sites go, this gives you the ability to create a unique look unlike say, Facebook. But it keeps things much cleaner than the design nightmare that is MySpace.

Creating a cool background is the key to differentiating yourself on Twitter. After reading Jennifer Farley, of Laughing Lion Design‘s excellent  tutorial on Sitepoint (click here to read it) about creating your own backgrounds for Twitter. I was inspired, and created some generic templates based on her tutorial. Download the my templates and use Jennifer’s tutorial and these templates and before you know it, you’ll have a background that will make everyone a twitter about. Oh, man, I can’t believe I actually used a lame twitter pun. Twitter puns are the lowest form of humor, it makes one sound like, dare I say it… a twit. I did it again!

Download these free templates for your own use, pass along the link if you like them. The templates for Photoshop and Illustrator with guides and are in the three most common browser sizes (800×600, 1024×768 & 1280×1024), though the 800×600 might be a bit useless, but you might as well have the complete set. These were created in the CS3, if anyone is interested I can save down the Illustrator version to an earlier version.

Also you can follow me on Twitter.

A few secrets from the Deke Lounge, you ‘betcha!

Photoshop? You 'betcha!

When you visit the Deke Lounge to experience some liquid learning make sure you take off your shoes. The incomparable Deke McClelland and Colleen Wheeler do another bang up job in the Lounge this week. Joining them again are Russell Brown, the Bill Nye of Photoshop (okay it’s just the white lab coats that make me think this) and John Nack Adobe wizard and wordsmith.

This week the patrons of the Lounge discuss Layers and Filters in Photoshop. While imbibing at the Lounge,  John Nack let slip some interesting factoids about my beloved Photoshop. It must have been the strong filtered and layered Martini that freed his already verbose tongue.

First cat that escaped the bag was that in CS4 the maximum number of layers that you could have in an individual file is somewhere on the order of 8,000. Though one of the commenter’s on deke.com say this isn’t true, but it only matters on the amount of RAM you have. The commenter labeled his comment as AFAIK,  which I had no idea what that meant. After consulting with Dr. Google, I discovered it means ” As Far As I Know.” Considering that I can’t see why you would want even 1,000 layers let alone 8,000, I don’t think I’ll spending any time testing this. So I’ll just trust John Nack on this one .

The second secret of Photoshop John slipped was that although the maximum size of a PSD is 200,000px x 200,000px it wasn’t always this way. At one point they were testing letting a PSD have a max image size of 2 million pixels by 2 million pixels, you know in case you wanted to literally Photoshop the moon. However Adobe couldn’t find a powerful enough machine that wasn’t previously engaged trying to beat Gary Kasparov  to work on a file that large. So were stuck with only 200,000 measly pixels, who can do anything with that?

Finally and most awesome was the revelation that the super secret  Adobe code name for the Photoshop component code is,  Fargo. As in Fargo the movie… you ‘betcha! The component code is apparently the engine that runs the software and with the head of the code cut off adobe uses this code in its other suite of programs (Flash, Illustrator, etc…) so they can use PSD’s and keep the structure of the file.  Keeping the hierarchical structure of image files, in a way turns Photoshop into a sort of database program when you jump from program to program, which is very cool.

This is pretty interesting internal info, and it even was so cool it got Colleen to temporarily speak in the 3rd person! Listen to the Martini Hour and you’ll see. In addition to this version, all the previous versions of the code were also named after other Coen Brother’s films,  including Blood Simple, I sure hope Raising Arizona was in there.

Man, Photoshop, programming and Coen Brother’s? TRIPLE GEEK SCORE! Also the before mentioned commentator, who claims his name is one Jeff Tranberry said:

The component code names come from the Minnesota engineering team, specifically Tim Wright, who’s a huge Coen Bros. fan (The Coens are originally from MN).

I can’t believe I am actually quoting someone from the internet!  But it seems legit enough to me. On a creepy note when researching this I did find that Timothy Wright, the Adobe Systems Engineer  in question donated in the 2008 presidential election. See what sort of weird information you can find on the internet! Though the elections commission said precious little about the film habits of Mr. Wright.

Go check out the Deke Lounge…. and don’t forget to take off your shoes!