CSI: Miami (Street)
A lot of guys have been asking me lately where i got my "mad skillz" doing Photoshop. Now, i am probably not the best one to give a tutorial on photoshopping...especially since i don't use Photoshop (because i can't afford it). Then again, you don't need a Xerox copier to xerox your butt late at night at the office, nor a Kleenex brand kleenex to clean up the mess you're eventually gonna make. Plus, there are far-better artists on here than me; i'm merely a tinkerer. Then again, maybe i can encourage more of you to start tinkering on your own...if i can do it, ANYone can do it. It's just a matter of figuring out what you got, what you want and fuck around with it until you come up with something you like.
The hardest part, sometimes, is coming up with an idea. Fortunately, with profkampf's community art projects, that helps. Of course, being given an assignment and then having to go make something of it - the design, the approach, the actual creation of it - can be more difficult than just fiddling around. i have found that in the past year, i have developed somewhat of a "photo-journalistic eye" and look for weird and interesting things to show you all. About that time, i decided that every post in my LJ was going to have a picture. For the most part, i would just be writing about my friends and stuff that i'd taken pictures of or that i'd concocted pictures of. i take my little Kodak "Brownie" with me everywhere. i got it from kiwi59 for xmas a couple years ago. Nothing fancy...it's small enough to fit in with my skimpier outfits (have you seen my leather shorts??), metal case that's "wooferproof", a nice big screen and some simple presets. It doesn't focus very well when it's zoomed in, so i have kinda learned to live w/out that function. But with 5Mp, i can crop in the computer and still have it look good enough for what i'm doing. And i take pictures of EVERYTHING!! i've gotten pretty good at being my own paparazzi and doing the arms-length shot of myself with a friend or two (such as the pic with my Dad the day before yesterday). Other times, i'll just stick the camera out there and shoot with out even looking. i don't like using the flash on here because it tends to wash everything out. i take a LOT of pictures...thanks to digital storage. Most are crap. Sometimes you get lucky.
Back to our project. i was assigned "#5: The Umbrella". i had first thought of doing something along the lines of Magritte's infamous "This is not a pipe..." painting. i thought he had done a "This is not an umbrella" painting as well, but my research (a quick run on Google images) came up with nothing, so i moved on. Too derivitive, anyway. Of course, everyone has seen this gag in old slapstick comedy setups. Sunny day, the sad sack opens his umbrella and it promptly rains on him. So that was the idea...how to do it? Matt suggested shooting the hose up into the umbrella, but the logistics would be hard and the water would drip too much at the edges. i wanted more of a direct shower...like it was coming from another dimension inside the umbrella. Of course, since it was to be representative of my blog, i had to wear as little as possible, so it was time for the little red speedo that Matt had gotten for me.
["...little red Speedo..."; sounds like the bear version of the "little black dress", eh?]
Of course, with Matt's knee operation and everything, i was running short on time, so i had to get down and dirty with it. Fortunately, we got a sunny weekend and i was able to enlist our buddy, Lance, to help out as he has in the past (most notably on the John & Yoko homage last December). i set Matt up in a chair on the porch so he could take some "making-of" shots for me.
Hmmm...what to do? Which umbrella will look the best? i decided that the red and white one would look the best rather than the red and black; more cheery. i explained the concept to Lance and what kind of pictures i was after. We looked at the way the water was coming out of the hose and which setting would look the most like rain. i had an old scrub brush with a metal handle that would look like the umbrella pole. i didn't want to use the umbrella itself since a)it would throw shadows on me and b)it would interfere with it "raining" on me. i had to think about my poses to include where to hold the stick since it needed to come up right in the middle of the final product so the umbrella would be centered and as large as possible.
So, take pictures. Take LOTS of pictures. Who knew that photographing raindrops in broad daylight would be so difficult? We actually went outside a couple times since the first time the sun was more overhead and it just wasn't reflecting off the water. We also tried different directions to get something plus using fill-flash (forcing the flash to go off even when it normally wouldn't to fill in shadows when the sun is behind the subject). i also took pictures of Lance holding the umbrella and a few with no one in them so i could get a nice sky blue sky for the background. Of course, Lance was more than happy to hose me down. Fortunately it was in the 80s, so it wasn't too bad. But MAN was that water cold! And it's hard to tell if the self-timer had gone off or to give directions to Lance with water streaming into my eyes, nose and mouth.
After awhile, i decided i had enough pictures. Actually, Lance decided he'd had enough and had to get going. So i too a look at all my pictures to see what i had. i chose the ones that i liked the best to start with and would enlist others in case i needed parts, just like Frankenstein. As i said earlier, i don't have Photoshop. i have this program called Microsoft Digital Image. But the concepts are the same and you can find the basic tools in pretty much any contemporary image editing program.
The first thing to remember, if you don't remember anything else, is no never futz with your original. Open the picture, save it as something else and then work on the copy. Granted, a lot fo times you can undo a lot of the stuff you've done, but why take chances, eh? Storage is cheap...go get an auxiliary hard drive. You'll thank me for that chestnut one day.
i started out with a background. profkampf dictated the size and resolution of the finished product, so i opened a new picture with those properties. Then i took the background picture of the beautiful clear sky above our street and dropped it into the project. i did a silly putty on it and just stretched it until the original frame was filled with sky. Anything outside the bounderies was garbage and would go away later. That was the bottom layer and i locked it in place. Then i took the picture of me and my stick that i liked the best. Of course, i noticed that on this outing, i was holding the broom the wrong way, so the whole brush was on my belly. Not a problem. i went to another picture that i'd taken just one or two away from this one where i was holding the stick at an angle. i took the line tracer and drew a circle around my belly and crotch similar to where the stick was on the good one and copied it. Then i dropped it in on the good one to cover up the stick. i faded the edges a little to blend it in and locked it onto the original. i had to use the clone brush to touch it up just a little bit more since the stick was too long. The clone brush lets you click on one thing that you want to copy and then click on the area to be covered up. As you move, the brush stroke you create copies where the target is pointing. It takes a little practice to get used to, but with a little practice, you can master this skill. You'll be surprised how often you'll use it to clean things up or make things (or people) go away. By the same token, i had all of the houses on the block in the shot as well down around speedo level and i decided that they detracted from my design, so i decided that they needed to go away. Fortunately, i had my lovely sky blue background. On the layer with me i got a transperancy brush and started erasing. It's just like erasing with an eraser...you just have to get smaller and more detailed as you get close to your subject. If you look closely, you can see where i erased a little part of my belly. It was late, i was on deadline and Matt needed me, so i let it go and actually didn't notice it until later. Oh well.
OK, so i had a soggy woofer on with a stick. i needed rain and an umbrella for it to rain out of. i decided that the best thing would be for my rain to run parallel to the umbrella shaft. Fortunately, i had one picture that had it. Again, i traced a circle and copied it to my picture. Twice. What i had wasn't enough, so two times mde it work. i faded one onto the other and glued them together. Then i dropped it on top of me. Yes, "raindrops were falling on my head". i put it into position and then went and cut my umbrella out of the picture where Lance was graciously holding onto it. The lighting on it was great, so i didn't have to mess with it. i dropped that on top of the whole thing. i fiddled with the size and made sure that the angle and location matched the stick i was holding. i got my raindrops into position and then brought up the edge fader and transparency controls to make it blend into the background and then the transparency brush to totally erase it over me since i was soggy enough.
Matt said that you can't have rain without a rainbow and fortunately i had a picture that had a rainbow in it. i cut out the rainbow, squeezed it together a little, then once again called on the edge fader and transparency controls and just played with it until i liked it. The last touch was to put the text on it. This is just a matter of taste and "Wide Latin" just seemed to capture the feel for me. i'm a big fan of putting shadows behind my text on pictures like this. without the shadow, it's easy for the text to blend into the photo that it's over, especially if you have a multicolored background; sometimes NO color will stand out on it's own. i chose a drop shadow, brought the transparency down and blurred it. Just futz around with the levels to get what you want.
And that's pretty much it. You don't need the really fancy programs...most of these features are in the cheaper ones like mine. Just play with them. Cut a picture out of one and drop it into another like i did in my "what's in YOUR wallet" post or even the "incident on Miami St." picture up at the top.
The important thing is "have FUN!!" WOOF!!