Manip - Chauhura
Title: Chauhura
Artist: Hakka ( prue84 )
Fandom: Star Trek (TOS)
Pairing: Chapel/Uhura
Characters: Nyota Uhura, Christine Chapel
Rating: PG-13
Tagline: The ladies of the USS Enterprise finally have some time for themselves.
Notes: The original is a 90's poster/ad for safe sex. When I saw it on my dashboard, some months ago, I heard it tell me "Chapel/ ( Read more... )
Artist: Hakka ( prue84 )
Fandom: Star Trek (TOS)
Pairing: Chapel/Uhura
Characters: Nyota Uhura, Christine Chapel
Rating: PG-13
Tagline: The ladies of the USS Enterprise finally have some time for themselves.
Notes: The original is a 90's poster/ad for safe sex. When I saw it on my dashboard, some months ago, I heard it tell me "Chapel/ ( Read more... )
Congrats, take the plunge, descend into hell! Welcome.
Or not. Don't. Save yourself! D:
Ok. Hm. Actually... I have no advice to give? I pretty much self-taught myself, for the little I am able to do. There are plenty of tutorials on youtube for manips, though, and search for them whenever you want to achieve something and you don't know how, instead of wasting time playing around like me. There are videos introduction to PS which should be mandatory, especially to learn how to cut images. Again, I never watched them because I'm a lazy ass, but don't make my mistake. :D
Well, this if you don't have a grasp on PS already, obviously. Speaking of that, get yourself Photoshop if you don't have it already: Adobe released the CS2 version for free and it works pretty well. You might have to do some magic to make it work on newer OS but CS2 is love <3 [if you're a newbie, remember: ctrl+s, ctrl+s ctrl+s ctrl+s ctrl+s - I can't stress the concept enough!]
I don't usually fix light much (because I'm unable and I'm too lazy to study again how light work), so I tend to find pics that already have matching lights but sometimes you simply have to manually fix things. Using corrections ("Levels", "Brightnes/contrast") with masks usually works, although at times I had to play with a very useful function called "Shadow/Highlight" that allows you to fix light and shadows.
Sometimes you'll have to reconstruct things. I know there's a brush that does that, but sometimes going copy/past with small bits manually selected is better.
The smaller the manip the higher the quality and the less likely you'll notice anything funny or wrong, so don't be scared to scale. Although, in cases, you might want to use that lovely tool called "sharpen" filter. Always applied as new layer, never on the original!
If you fail to uniform the color of face and body, go all black/white: it always work.
Any general advice? Don't be scared by using 189165198 layers: better have a layer for every smallest retouch than have to redo a whole bunch because a small bit doesn't work after a second review.
Also. Take your time to work on the thing in the span of more days. Make as many breaks you can. Shift between 100% to 50%. Everything helps to notice if something doesn't work: your eyes get used eventually, so reviewing the manip a day later is useful (it's like beta work but for graphics instead of written works).
Oh, and last but not least:
- don't be overly critical. You will never get the result you want to achieve, never (well, unless you're a genius or learn how to paint on manips): don't be too hard on yourself, it's not worth it, in the end.
- if you start post your things, you'll get little attention. On Tumblr, especially, many people like but don't reblog manips. Hell if I know why. Manipping is considered that grey area that a big part of fandom doesn't know what to do with.
Nothing else comes to mind at the moment. Feel free to drop by if you have further questions, or if you want to rant about manipping or what. :)
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Thank you for your photoshop advice! Actually, I'm not new to photoshop (almost 13 years now), and have been making other kinds of graphics (icons, photo edits, wallpapers, etc) but it is a good tip about corrections with masks and "shadow/highlight"! Even though I've used photoshop for a long time, I haven't really used masks all too often, so that's something I'll need to adventure into.
I've only done "minor" photo manipulations but these were all done for my mom's high school reunion pictures ("Can you put this person in this picture so it looks like she was in the picture but wasn't?" or "Can you move this person because with the frame I got, they'll be blocked and no one will see them?") and it's nothing like the things I've seen you or other manip artists created. Those turned out fairly good and so I'm confident enough in making people looking like they have the same lighting or that they look like they were supposed to be in that position but nothing too complex.
And also, I do use a bajillion layers but I never though to think about using a layer for a simple retouch, which would make sense if that retouch ends up being bad for the picture or needs to be fixed somehow. 100% to 50% is something I do sometimes when I make graphics, doesn't hurt to have perspective!
That's really sad no one really comments or reblogs the manips on tumblr. I know when manips were big on livejournal people would comment! Maybe it's the nature of tumblr itself? A lot of times no one checks what a person liked (unless it's displayed on their blog) but reblogs are visible on their page, and maybe manips make some people (obviously not the user who liked it) uncomfortable? Unless they're afraid some people are going to believe the manip is a real picture (which in some fandoms I've seen with manips, for a second they believe it because it's so well done but people have had to correct them otherwise though no one knocked on the manipulations itself).
But thank you so much for answering! It's nice to hear from someone who understands all the struggles of photoshop, lol! Also, when I do post my first manip, I'll tag you in the post so you can check it out. :D
(And everyone told me to save myself from using tumblr... and I did for almost two years but I want to engage in fandom so I guess I have to make a deal with the devil, and use the hell site. I don't regret being able to participate again but tumblr sometimes... YEAH.)
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I miss the tracking feature of LJ, especially when you picked the tag so you didn't have to deal with the rest of crap people might've posted.
13 years? Then more than me! I started with Paint Shop Pro 7 in... 2004 I guess? At the time I started with PSP when we decided to get involved with Fanlistings, which meant create headers.
But I started to get serious some years later when a friend talked me into switch to Photoshop. It took me MONTHS to get used (creature of habit here) and two years too see that yes, perhaps PS was better than my copy of Paint Shop Pro.
Some months ago I was talking about the lack of reblogs on manips with Wolfi-sama on Tumblr (if you don't follow her, run to do it and make sure to watch her every Trek manips: she's into Spirk but also ChaUhura too) and she spoke about the whole "uncomfortable" thing. I'm old (1984 baby here) and I don't care about others anymore, so it never occurred to me that there might be Tumblers who feel bad at reblogging something.
(Tumblr. I was tempted to make one when Cannedabonbon, just to name a "big one" in the Spirk fandom, moved mostly there, but I'm a creature of habit and I tend to move only at the very last moment. I don't even remember why, in the end, I relented. XD)
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I liked the tracking feature of LJ too! Though I never got to use it, I heard how useful it was. I didn't know you could use it for tags too? That's pretty awesome. I know you can filter your friends page using your own post filters, and that makes it easy to read things on your own time. I wish there could be a similar feature on tumblr, because it would be easy to group "users" into "filters".
The reason I've been using Photoshop for a long time is when my dad was working in Russia, he bought a lot of computer programs cheap, and one of them was Photoshop 5. I loved that thing.
I knew people who used PSP, especially a lot of artists! And then them shifting over to Corel Painter and all sorts of other programs... But yeah PSP is more like Photoshop Lite in a lot of ways? It was a good program but nothing like Photoshop back then and even now. I can understand how it would be hard to transition into Photoshop. All the free, online photo editors try to mimic photoshop now.
Oh fanlistings... Those were wonderful things. My friend ran a couple of them and hosted it on her domain. My friend was amazing at graphics though back in the day. Some the stuff she made back then would hold up now. She was one of my inspirations for graphics and helped me a lot in understanding photoshop even though I'm sure she ALSO used PSP. The online world is less rich in amazing graphics because she backed away but I supported her 100% on that. Fandom treated her like SHIT despite the amazing stuff she put out and drifted into smaller, more accepting fandoms. Now she just does photography for said fandom and puts it online. She's great at it but it's just one of those things you know?
I've seen her stuff being reblogged on my dash but not her manips! I didn't know she made some. I'll be sure to check it out. And that's interesting she mentioned about the "uncomfortable" thing too. Was this in a chat or did she actually make a post? That would be interesting to read! I love meta and discussions of that kind of nature (I made a friend on tumblr because of it, it's quite awesome). I'm also old, or at least, older than most of tumblr (you're actually my sister's age, so it's not that old but we're old compared to like... 90% of tumblr?).
But even when I was making and participating in fandom in 2004 I didn't give much about others' opinions either. I paid attention on how I could use myself as a representative of a fansite my friend (that I mentioned above) and our other mutuals were running at the time, but on my own personal time, I don't care. I am highly aware of how others are feeling though, so I can sense how it could make people "uncomfortable". But I think it's how the manip is also portrayed too, like if you're using the actor's faces that are recognizable in their character's form (like Spock with his ears or Rand with her crazy hair) then it's easy for people to go "Oh that's a manip" than if it's more realistic (say using their real life pictures outside of their character). Still would be interesting hearing other people's opinions on it!
Yeah, I didn't move over when people were migrating out. But I was also in a long time lurkerdom stage, so as long as I could see where people were going, it was good. It wasn't until 2014 that I started to really see people stop using LJ for good (I swear Into Darkness must've killed fandom for awhile) or at least the start of it, and I ended up joining other places that weren't tumblr for fandom. I think I only relented this year because that's where my fandom was AT and no where else and I wanted to be in it. So it's sad we gotta do these things but if you don't adapt, you'll be left out of fandom! *sigh*
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<< I've seen her stuff being reblogged on my dash but not her manips! I didn't know she made some. I'll be sure to check it out. And that's interesting she mentioned about the "uncomfortable" thing too. Was this in a chat or did she actually make a post? >>
I don't remember, but I think it was via chat (the IM Tumblr feature). Probably prompted by a post in which I was "whining" because I felt bad and depressed and I had just posted a manip that hadn't got any attention and I felt that I was useless.
I admit that it irks me the whole "uncomfortable" thing, though. In the fandom are accepted NC-17 fanarts made by (amazing) artists who are able to capture the likeness of the actors, so sometimes it's just like seeing the two actors doing ""stuff"", but then the same fandom is... dubious about a manip of the two character holding a hand? Bah. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, though, so I won't complain. It's just that, sometimes, it feels like your screaming in a void.
[Into Darkness split the fandom. People I adored that complained so much of the movie. It was far from perfect but not as faulty as part of the fandom cried. Ah!]
My inbox is always welcome, if you want to ask something. ;)
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