Ive been playing a little more with photoshop and logos – in many cases I’ve been taking tutorials that i found on line and messing with them, but some of the results are interesting – its amazing what you can do with text effects in Photoshop. In particular I’ve been messing around a lot with light effects and translucency a lot – below are some of the results.

Update 2012-02-04: I have had these on my site while now and i decided to take down the plastic effect logo from the site – as i didn’t really like it. Instead yesterday i tinkered with a chrome logo which i am please with as i did it single handedly – I’ve put that in.

If you can’t find variations on your photoshop menu (Image > Adjustments > Variations) its probably because the plugin is disabled when CS5 is run in 64 bit mode (which it did for me by default). The way to correct this is to go into your applications folder on your mac – select your Photoshop cs5 icon and do a CMD+I on the file. In there there is a checkbox for open in 32bit mode (in the General pane) – Make sure its selected. You can then start CS5 and magically the menu item reappears!

This is what I did last night. The pic is ok but what was important to me is the learning process. I did this really late at night, as I had just read about some things I could do with refine edge and couldn’t wait! In doing this I learned  several ways of selecting things – the quick select tool is the best – I learned why they call the magic wand the tragic want (I heard a guy from adobe say that). There were several versions of the pic, all of them different refine edge options. Bread and butter workflow seems to be quick select followed by refine edge. I will need to work with this more.

I learned creating layers and solid filling them. So at this point I had cut me out of the original photo and put me on a black background.I then loaded and modified an image of dark wood, created a layer for modifying the brightness of the background.

I then took the picture layer and started trying different effects on it until I found a paint effect I liked, and applied it to both the foreground and background.. i used slightly different effects on both just to see if i could. It’s not an awesome pic – it has me in it, but it was an awesome learning experience. I will continue to tweak it just for fun and then add it to my gravatar.

Its me!

Ok this week i have gone a little photoshop mad – i saw a demo of photoshop at the weekend and saw a couple of really cool things including puppet warping and content aware fills. These things aren’t new, CS5 has been around for a bit now, but I’ve just not really had time to get into it, and probably wouldn’t have done if i hadn’t seen an adobe guy show it off. Then for me, it was like a toy i had to have. So first thing i had to do is buy a copy which i did online 2 days back, and i am still waiting for my order to be fulfilled – in the interim i downloaded a trail copy. Its interesting to note that there are some stupendous savings there if you are a student – from 1700USD to 200USD, which is cool. Im not a student.
So anyway last night i took it for a spin – I present to you my first attempt at photoshopping. 
 
The bird pic did originally have a hose pipe running on the left. To sort it I had to do the following
 
Load it – it was a raw file, on loading it it gives me options to change colour balance which made me wonder if photoshop files retain all the information when you save a raw to a psd. I still don’t have an answer.
 
Select it – learning about quick select and the shortcuts there.
 
Content aware fill – Did an ok job but was a bit dissapointed  when I zoomed in it looked like a bit of a train wreck.
 
Blur it – blurring the areas had just done got rid of obvious jaggy edges of colour that up you see in zoom but this also looked edited as it removed the colour noise
 
Add colour noise –  added 5% noise and the image was near perfect. There is still imperfections there but you wouldn’t see them unless you were looking for them, I am sure later I will come back and do a better job of this!
 
 
I’m now getting fairly adept with the keyboard shortcuts!