Gradients are cool

When working in the coloring industry it's important to know what your tools can do.
Every tool is useful. Otherwise why would they have made it. Don't ever let someone tell you that a tool isn't useful simply because they've never used it. I once had someone tell me that the pen tool was useless - that person was an idiot. His parents were probably idiots too...

There are so many tools to play with but today we'll be focusing on the Gradient tool.

The gradient tool takes two or more images and blends them together. It can create very cool effects. I used gradients to create this Traitor web banner.
Kristy likes the gradient tool and was trying to use it on an ad we were working on.

She was having a little trouble...


It obviously wasn't as easy as it looked.

Now you'll see how easy it really is. After learning this tool you'll be as excited as you were when you first found out how many different fonts there are. Remember?


Let's use these two photos.



Using the move tool, located at the top of the tool bar, drag the pizza sign photo onto the pizza photo. Position the top photo how ever you like. With the top layer selected click on the Add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layer palette to add a layer mask to the selected layer.

Now with the top layer still selected take the gradient tool and click on the pizza sign image at a point where you want the gradient to begin and hold the mouse down while you move to another point to mark where the gradient will end. Make sure that your foreground and background colors are set to the
black & white default.

Now you have blended two images together and it should look something like this.



Oh, and here's the finished ad.

A look behind the curtain

For Thomas, Kristy and anybody else who is interested.

On July 21 I posted this photo:

and this is the original

You might've noticed that the original has no clouds. Mother nature wasn't making clouds that day so I decided to add in clouds myself.

I'm a huge fan of clouds. 

1st you need clouds. If I ever see clouds I like, I snap them and keep them on file for later.

For this photo I used these clouds.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3. If you have an older version of Photoshop you should still be able to follow along. You might even be able to blend in clouds using Barney's Pixel Fun. I can't be 100% sure though since I don't use B.P.F.

2nd step - Using the Move Tool in Photoshop drag the clouds onto the building.

Position them however you like them and then switch the blending mode on your Layers palette to Darken.

Now, depending on your image you may need to edit your clouds a little. Plus, from my experience, this trick only works with photos that have a white sky. Since the sky in my factory photo is completely washed out it worked perfectly. 

I added the clouds this way because I wanted to keep it easy. Although you could add clouds in a different way. There are usually several different ways to manipulate something, it just depends on the photo you're working with.

If you have a photo like this
here's another way to edit in a different sky.

Open up a vertical cloud photo out of your cloud photo archive and drag the cloud photo onto the tree photo using the Move Tool.


If you don't have a cloud photo archive you should really start making one.

Now take the Magic Wand tool and select the blue sky. Simply click anywhere in the blue area.

If you click to make your selection and some of the sky wasn't selected, like in this photo where the branches divide the sky into sections, then go up to Select and choose Similar and all other colors similar to your selection will become selected.




Now, with the cloud layer active hit Apple + J to move your cloud selection up into its own layer. On a PC it's Control + J.

Then go to your Layers palette and turn off the original cloud image that you dragged in by simply clicking off the eyeball on the left of the layer.

and voilà!

How to make an arrow sign

Today I'm going to show you how to make an arrow sign.

You may think an arrow sign is a simple two minute task but you'd be wrong. I was asked to make a temporary arrow sign for the Mayan Restaurant's waiting line. "Just make a simple arrow sign that says Enter Here," my boss told me. Hmm, that sounds easy enough. Wrong.
I made this is two minutes.


Then my boss came over to give me instructions on how to make it right.
It went something like this: "The arrow looks crooked. What font is that? That's not a good font. Use Myriad Pro. Make the font bold. Make the arrow black... no, make it red again. Make it look good and call me over when you have it ready."

I put more effort into the sign to make sure it was perfect because we were going to have the sign printed on photo paper and framed.

First I made some guides to make sure everything was straight and aligned perfectly. I changed the font to Myriad Pro Bold Condensed. Then I used the pen tool to draw a perfect arrow.


If you've been following along your arrow should look like this. If it doesn't you better start over.


Now the sign is perfect. I printed it on regular 8.5x11 paper and then we taped the piece of paper to the stanchion pole at front of the line at the Mayan. The next day the sign had a refried bean stain on it and the day after that it was torn and crumpled on the floor.

I'm glad we spent 30 minutes on making it perfect. If you ever are given the assignment to make an arrow sign please take this perfect sign and use it. I'll feel good knowing that my sign got more use out of it.