Just For Fun!

Amazing what you can do in 20 minutes!

Memories Of Banjo

Today, my sisters Seeing Eye Dog in training returned the the Seeing Eye facility for further training. He was a part of our family for 1 year & 153 days.

Here is a few of our memories...

We will all miss him!

Computer Generated Visual Effects

In the last couple of years, visual effects and computer generated imagery has come a long way. A few years ago, some of these videos would never have been possible. Such as Narnia, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Transformers ect...

Here is a video that I thought was neat in the regards to visual effects.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did!

Photoshop

I recently learned how to do fog in Photoshop and wanted to practice it on something. I decided to make my own picture up from two pictures.

Believe it or not, these are the original pictures!

OK, if you are like me you are wondering how I did it! Here are the basic steps that I took.

First I chose a gray color for the background.  Then, I placed the mountain picture on top of the gray background and used my Quick Selection tool to select the sky. Once I had the sky selected I deleted it. 

Next I drag the castle on top of the mountain picture. Again I used the Quick Selection tool to select the castle and the little tree on the right side of the castle. I contracted the selection by 2 pixels and feathered it by 1. Next, I inverted and deleted.

I then took my Selection Brush tool and selected the retaining wall on the left side of the castle and deleted. Now for the little tree. I used my Spot Healing Brush and went over the part of the tree that is covering the castle thus replacing the side of the castle. I then selected what was left of the tree with the Selection Brush and deleted.

Next, I moved the castle where I wanted in the picture and scaled it down. As you can see in the original castle picture, the castle is at a perspective that doesn't match the picture. To fix this, I used the distort option and pushed the bottom two corners together more until it was in the correct perspective. 

Once all of the picture sizing and re-positioning was done, it was time to add fog. I used a paint brush that doesn't have a very hard falloff. Meaning a brush that is not so hard around the outside. Here is an example...

This one has too hard of an edge.

This is the kind of brush that you want too use for fog. Notice how the edges seem too fade away.

When I painted the fog, I don't just use one layer. You get more realistic looking fog if you use multiple layers. For this picture I used 9 layers of fog. After I painted a spot of fog I then Gaussian blur it by 2 pixels and change the opacity of that layer so that it somewhat transparent just like fog. 

When I use layers, I place some fog layers behind the castle and some in front. Some behind the mountain so that it looks as if the fog is coming off the mountain. 

After the fog is all painted in I then started to change the color levels and Hue & Saturation of the pictures so that they look like it is actually foggy. 

That is the basic idea of how I did things. How do you do fog?

The Two Lords Of Ashington

There will be a trailer soon!