Haunted House - Final

First off let me say that I wish I had more time!! I could have made this house so much better. But anyways, starting off from the last update, I have added a lot of darkness, some bushes, and clouds. I got an image of dark clouds and lowered the opacity so that it appears like fog. Other things I added were a couple of older windows, bushes to cover up some blemishes, and lots of darkness. I got it to look dark by lowering the brightness as well as the saturation. Afterwards I used the burn tool, especially in the corners of the house, to give it a dirty look.

Sphere - Final

It isn't perfect but here's my sphere. I now have all of the shadows, the reflections, the hot spot, etc. This project was really time consuming because I always messed something up and had to spend time fixing it again. And because I fixed that I messed something else up and it just formed a vicious cycle... The key is to work slowly and in small, carefully planned out increments when it comes to blending colors/shadows on something like a sphere.

Windows Vista Aurora Effect

Tutorial: http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/photoshop-tutorials/creating-the-windows-vista-lighting-effect/

Original image [I chose this image because it has a lot of color which adds to the end result]

First I applied a very significant Gaussian blur to the photo. Second, I changed the levels and stopped when I was satisfied with this purplish blend. To make the bands of light, I used the elliptical selection tool to make a selection and then colored in the edge with white using a large brush on 0% hardness. Finally, I rotated it until satisfied and repeated that process until I felt I had enough bands of light. I like how it turned out - very simple, yet very cool.

Final

Colorful Swirl

Tutorial used: http://phonuts.org/tutorials/special-effects/colourful-swirl/

Start with clouds.

Pixelate.

Use radial blur of 100 twice.

Twirled 120 degrees.

Layer duplicated, twirled -180 degrees and blending mode turned to lighten.

Changed the hue of both layers.

Final result

This is a really cool and simple effect in my opinion. While doing this I realized that I am getting extremely comfortable with Photoshop and it is getting smoother and easier to translate ideas in my head directly down to the program.

Space Lighting FX

Tutorial used: http://abduzeedo.com/space-lighting-effects-10-steps-photoshop-tutorial

I started with a black background and added a soft radial gradient peeking over the top.

Here I created a new black layer and added RGB lights (Filter > Render > Lighting Effects > RGB Lights)

...now with Gaussian blur.

Another black layer was added on top with the blending set to Screen. Small stars were added here by adding Noise and altering the Levels so that only the desirable amount of specks of white were left behind.

Now clouds were added to give a nice texture and a more gas-like appearance. Also, the color of the stars was changed to a colorful spectrum using a gradient.

The lens flare was added to give a nice illuminating effect. Now it really starts to look like a colorful space nebula.

To make the letter Z, I started with new layer. Then I painted in white, using a large brush on 0% hardness. Afterwards, I chopped it down on the side to create a clear line. Next step was to simply duplicate, rotate, and resize as necessary to create the Z. Done!

Final (for some reason the stars don't look the same as in the PSD file...)

I had some trouble with getting this one to look decent, but once I took my time and paid real attention to the instructions it wasn't that bad. I decided to make a 'Z' for my name. It's crazy how people can come up with designs like this. I guess they just might do some random things, see what turns out, and learn from it.

Sphere Update 2

Today I tried to perfect the sphere but it seemed like everything I did only ended up making it worse so I had to restart a few times.. The shadow is starting to look better since it is sharper now but there is still the issue of shaping it correctly. Also, the shading for the sphere still looks a bit off. As of now it still looks fairly flat and dull, unlike the reference which looks 3D, shiny, and smooth.

Sphere Update 1

After a few tweaks to the sphere, I've started in on the shadows. So far they look bad but with some more blending, erasing and shaping they should be good. It's difficult to get things the way you want because I tend to either change things too much or not enough.

Color Blending

 Yellow, Red, Blue blend

Blue, Black, Red blend

Using the brush on very low flow (1-5%) and a little bit of a lowered opacity (60-80%) I was able to blend the colors efficiently. I overlapped the colors and selected the resulting color in the middle to blend and continued with that process.
PS. It looks a lot better than this. The files must have lost some quality when converted to jpeg.

Brushes

Some more experimenting with brushes! I made the stars by modifying the brush to have a high scatter so that I could paint several at once rather than painting each individual one. I also decided to create a planet because I wanted to practice making spheres. I like the look of it and made it smudged to give it a natural look. It reminds me of Mars. I also put in some ambient white light in the background by using a large brush with low opacity to lighten it up a bit.

Sphere

I've just started making this 3D sphere. So far I have the basic shape and general idea of shadow (it helped to use a mask so that I was only able to color within the circle) but there is plenty more work to be done. I still need the ground shadow, ambient shadow, specular highlight, etc, and better blending in general.

Brushes

Here is another experiment with brushes. I upped the size of different brushes to the point where they were square-ish with 90 degree angles. By lowering the opacity I was able to get different shades by simply layering them on top of each other. This created a cool camouflage effect so I went with it. I also made it smudged at the end by using another brush at a large size.

Brushes

Here I was experimenting with the different brushes and settings. First I set down a general idea of what I wanted, then painted on some grass with the grass paintbrush. After that was the fun part: the clouds. I knew that I had to make them wispy and see through like natural clouds so I turned down the hardness and erased a lot.

One Point Perspective Room

Here is the room complete with door and window! The same concept applies for both the door and window. You just have to know your lines and it isn't that hard.

One Point Perspective Room

Here is the simple one point perspective room with the guides (red). I just followed the directions and it was pretty easy to do and understand.
One thing I would like to mention is that it definitely helped me understand how to create real life 3D scenes that have depth to them.

One Point Perspective

Here is an example of one point perspective photography with a vanishing point. The horizon is shown in green. The natural lines of the photo leading to the vanishing point are shown in red. The vanishing point is shown in blue and seemed to be where the lines intersected.. The vertical lines are the rulers shown in light blue (I used the end of the bridge support beams and the end of the trees).

Haunted House Update 4

Today I continued to work on making the house look more run down, focusing on windows and shutters.

Haunted House Update 3

I've finally started to get a decent background going and I am still continuing to blend the house in. A creepier sky that will fit well is still needed, but it now has some fog and creepy trees. I am still looking for good bushes or tall grass or something of the sort to place in front of the house to help blend it in. I've also started on destroying the house a little by beginning to break the windows and make them look old. The lighting definitely needs to be fixed but I'm going to do that near the end when I have everything constructed.

Animated GIF

Here is the animated .gif I created of a flying bird along with the original image used. It was really easy and quick to do. I first edited out all the numbers and separated each frame into separate layers. Then I opened up the animation editor and put each separate frame in. Finally, to make it look natural and smooth I set the the time that each frame is shown to 0.1 sec and then saved it as a .gif image.

Haunted House Update 2

Today I managed to clean the house up quite a bit. I removed a lot of branches and other things that were obstructing the view of the house by copying/pasting sections of the house, as well as by using the healing brush tool and paintbrush. Next class I will finish up the last bits that need to be fixed and begin to look for backgrounds and foregrounds I can use to establish the setting of the house.

Haunted House Update 1

Today I cropped out the house as well as started to remove the pole/wire on the right side of the house that is attached . I'm going to use other parts of the house to reconstruct it.