Sketching Effect in Photoshop

I have worked with two different images to apply a sketching effect on them:



These are what the original images look like:




Using the Filter > Artistic settings of Adobe Photoshop, I was able to make them look like painted canvasses. Cool, isn't it?

Tiger's Eye

This is my first experiment regarding layers...




Why tigers? Well, simply because I have this huge fascination about tigers. As for the fading effect, I used the paintbrush tool for the layer mask. It was easy. All I did was to paint the rough edges of the image so that it will somehow create a fading effect. For the background, I used the gradient tool. The leafy effect of the shadings was just a personalized brush of leaves painted on the background itself. Somehow, I enjoyed this activity.

So, what do you guys think of it? =]

What Is Adobe Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It has been described as "an industry standard for graphics professionals" and was one of the early "killer applications" on Macintosh.

Photoshop CS3, the current tenth iteration of the program, was released on 16 April 2007. "CS" reflects its integration with other Creative Suite products, and the number "3" represents it as the third version released since Adobe re-branded its products under the CS umbrella. Photoshop CS3 features additions such as the ability to apply non-destructive filters, as well as new selection tools named Quick Selection and Refine Edge that make selection more streamlined. On April 30th, Adobe released Photoshop CS3 Extended, which includes all the same features of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the addition of capabilities for scientific imaging, 3D, and high end film and video users. The successor to Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS4, will be the first 64-bit Photoshop on consumer microcomputers.


Early History

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, then a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple Computer Inc. and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

Releases

Continual revisions were made to the program, with new versions released in the following years. In November 1992, a Microsoft Windows port of version 2.0 of the software was released, and a year later it was ported to the SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris platforms. In September 1994, version 3.0 was released, which introduced layers and tabbed palettes. In February 2003, the program shipped with the Camera RAW 1.x plug-in, which allowed the user to import RAW formats from different digital cameras directly into Photoshop.

In October 2004, the program was renamed Adobe Photoshop CS. The name uses the abbreviation CS for products in Adobe Creative Suite. The logo focused around a feather rendered in shades of blue and green, which was also used in 9.0. The 10th version, Photoshop CS3 was released on April 16, 2007, with a blue icon modeled after periodic table elements, matching the new icons of other Creative Suite products.

In January 2008, the Wine project announced official support for Photoshop CS2, allowing the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 to be used on Linux and other Unix platforms.

Photoshop is written in the C++ programming language.

Features

Photoshop has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. Files in Photoshop's native format, .PSD, can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Encore DVD to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, and the Web. For example, Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For .PSD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a cuing format, and Adobe Encore DVD reads them as buttons or menus.

Photoshop can utilize the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as: .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, Fireworks, etc. It also has several native file formats:

• The .PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, Clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. Photoshop's popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software.
• The .PSB (Large Document Format) format is a newer version of .PSD designed for files over 2 gigabytes.
• The .PDD (PhotoDeluxe Document) format is a version of .PSD that only supports the features found in the discontinued PhotoDeluxe software.

CS3

Photoshop CS3 is marketed with three main components of improvement over previous versions: "Work more productively, Edit with unrivaled power, and composite with breakthrough tools." New features propagating productivity include streamlined interface, improved Camera Raw, better control over print options, enhanced PDF support, and better management with Adobe Bridge. Editing tools new to CS3 are the Clone Source palette and nondestructive Smart Filters, and other features such as the Brightness/Contrast adjustment and Vanishing Point module were enhanced. The Black and White adjustment option improves users control over manual grayscale conversions with a dialog box similar to that of Channel Mixer. Compositing is assisted with Photoshop's new Quick Selection and Refine Edge tools and improved image stitching technology.

CS3 Extended contains all features of CS3 plus tools for editing and importing some 3D graphics file formats, enhancing video, and comprehensive image analysis tools, utilizing MATLAB integration and DICOM file support.

The logo comprises white letters "Ps" on a gradient blue square.

Reference:

http://www.wikipedia.org

What Is Digital Imaging?

Digital Image Editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations. Before digital scanners and cameras became mainstream, traditional analog image editing was known as photo retouching, using tools such as an airbrush to modify photographs, or editing illustrations with any traditional art medium. However, since the advent of digital images, analog image editing has become largely obsolete. Graphic software programs, which can be broadly grouped into vector graphics editors, raster graphics editors, and 3d modelers, are the primary tools with which a user may manipulate, enhance, and transform images. Many image editing programs are also used to render or create computer art from scratch.

Basics of image editing

Raster images are stored in a computer in the form of a grid of picture elements, or pixels. These pixels contain the image's color and brightness information. Image editors can change the pixels to enhance the image in many ways. The pixels can be changed as a group, or individually, by the sophisticated algorithms within the image editors. The domain of this article primarily refers to bitmap graphics editors, which are often used to alter photographs and other raster graphics. However, vector graphics software, such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, are used to create and modify vector images, which are stored as descriptions of lines, Bézier splines, and text instead of pixels. It is easier to rasterize a vector image than to vectorize a raster image- how to go about vectorizing a raster image is the focus of much research in the field of computer vision. People like vector images because they are easy to modify, containing descriptions of the shapes in them for easy rearrangement, as well as scalable, being rasterizable at any resolution- to rasterize a vector image is simply to render it, while scaling a raster image up involves guessing at data that isn't there, and even scaling a raster image down involves guessing unless the scaling factor is an integer.

Editing programs

Due to the popularity of digital cameras, image editing programs are readily available. Minimal programs, that perform such operations as rotating and cropping are often provided within the digital camera itself, while others are returned to the user on a compact disc (CD) when images are processed at a discount store. The more powerful programs contain functionality to perform a large variety of advanced image manipulations. Popular raster-based digital image editors include Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Corel Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro and Paint.NET. For more, see: List of raster graphics editors.

Digital data compression

Many image file formats use data compression to reduce file size and save storage space. Digital compression of images may take place in the camera, or can be done in the computer with the image editor. When images are stored in JPEG format, compression has already taken place. Both cameras and computer programs allow the user to set the level of compression.

Some compression algorithms, such as those used in PNG file format, are lossless, which means no information is lost when the file is saved. The JPEG file format uses a lossy compression algorithm- The greater the compression, the more information is lost, ultimately reducing image quality or detail. JPEG uses knowledge of the way the brain and eyes perceive color to make this loss of detail less noticeable.

Image editor features

Listed below are some of the most used capabilities of the better graphic manipulation programs. The list is by no means all inclusive. There are a myriad of choices associated with the application of most of these features.

• Selection
• Layers
• Image size alteration
• Cropping an image
• Histogram
• Noise removal
• Removal of unwanted elements
• Selective color change
• Image orientation
• Perspective correction and distortion
• Lens correction
• Sharpening and softening images
• Selecting and merging of images
• Slicing of images
• Special effects
• Change color depth
• Contrast change and brightening
• Color adjustments
• Printing

Reference:

http://www.wikipedia.org

Paint My Love

We all know what are colors for - to make everything livelier. But what do these colors really mean? Here are the answers:

RED

Since Philippines is dominated mostly by Chinese people, the color read means "fortune" in our country. In other countries, this color means VITALITY. The red ray furnishes sustenance for the physical body. It brings about:

• energy
• enthusiasm
• interest and passion
• security

ORANGE

In the Philippines, orange means "isolation", which is why most prisoners wear orange clothes. Generally speaking, orange means CREATIVE ENERGY.

Orange combines red and yellow. It contains the fiery energy of red with the wisdom and control of yellow. Orange is a dynamic energy like red but more thoughtful and controlled. Orange brings about:

• creativity
• playfulness
• exploration on a practical level
• relief from boredom
• equilibrium

YELLOW

In the Philippines, yellow represents "poverty". Other countries consider yellow as WISDOM. It is naturally associated with the sun itself, and so with its life giving and sustaining energy. This color enriches, lightens and activates many of the systems of the body. It's bright sunny energy brings about:

• clarity of thought
• orderliness
• memory improvement
• better decision making skills
• alleviates confusion

GREEN

In the Philippines and other countries, green represents LIFE, BALANCE, and NATURE. According to some studies, the human eye is able to recognize more variation in the color green than in any other color. Its energy contains:

• harmony
• sympathy
• health
• abundance
• balance
• growth and expansion

BLUE

In the Philippines, blue means "strength", as it is believed to be the color for masculinity, In other countries, though, blue symbolizes SPIRITUALITY. Blue is the color of distance - oceans, skies, the heavens. The energy of blue helps us to look beyond the immediate environment, expanding our perceptions towards the unknown. It is also the color of Divinity. It brings:

• Peace and understanding
• Enhances the easy flow of communication with yourself or others
• Calms and relaxes

INDIGO

To the Filipinos, indigo represents "knowledge". In other countries, indigo is the color of INFINITY. Indigo amplifies the energy of blue in a profound way. At a physical level, while blue is calming, indigo is sedating. It deepens and turns blue energy inward. The indigo ray symbolizes the bridge between the finite and the infinite and opens the door to the mystical borderland. While blue energy is fast, Indigo energy is more often lightening fast.

• opens the subconscious
• spiritual attainment
• self-mastery
• wisdom
• sudden awareness
• intuition
• psychic abilities
  

VIOLET

Most Filipinos think violet as a color of "royalty". While in other countries, it is considered as the HIGHEST ELEMENT OF SPIRITUAL MASTERY. It is also the highest and most subtle specialization of light, being at the opposite end of the color spectrum to red. It should be viewed as both a completion as well as a beginning of the energy vibration beyond the visible color spectrum. Violet is a combination of both red and blue and this is key to understanding this color. It brings a stabilizing energy to the franticness of red. It lends practicality to the undirected spaciousness of blue.

• darker tones are associated with sorrow
• deep purple signifies high spiritual attainment
• pale lilac brings love for humanity
• bluish purple brings idealism
• sparks the imagination and inspiration
• integrates other energies for healing purposes

References:

http://www.sfheart.com/color.html
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm
http://www.crystal-cure.com/

Urduja Movie Review

When I first watched the trailer of Urduja together with the movie "Horton Hears A Who", I really found it hard to believe that Filipinos can actually go this far. I was amazed by the two-dimensional graphics. If only the characters didn't speak in the trailer, I would actually thought it was another Disney flick. I really wanted to watch the movie, because despite of my age, I am still an animation lover. When the movie first came out, I asked my parents and brother if we can watch it. Sadly, my parents are not fond of animated films and my brother hates Tagalog movies. I also don't want to watch a movie alone, and I'm ashamed to invite my friends to watch it because they might think I'm baduy. But then, I was lucky enough that we were given an assignment to make a reaction paper regarding the movie. Because of that, I was able to convince my mother to accompany me to watch it.

What I loved most about the movie was the scenery of the setting. It really gives you a feel of how our ancestors lived during their time, and how they survived without the use of technology. It makes you feel as if you're really one of them.

The movie, though, has more negative sides. The girl Urduja looks like a rip-off from Mulan with her costume designs stolen from Pocahontas and Anastasia. The scene where she sang that song after her father requested her to marry the man she despises reminded me of the scenes where Mulan (voiced by Lea Salonga) sings "Reflection". Everything else looks so Disney. Colonial mentality is working in the veins of the Filipino artists as usual. There are also some very cheesy parts that I have to laugh sarcastically. Two of the characters even mentioned the words "H.H.W.W." (which means, "holding hands while walking") and "ewww!". I mean, those words were not recognized during that time. It would be better if they just made the dialog realistic.

Despite these flaws, I am happy that the Filipino animators are speeding up. They just need to make some improvements and I can see there will be Disney-like companies and productions in the Philippines in the near future.