Games Production

Submission Accepted

2008-11-10T13:15:36+01:00

I received an email today saying that my photo submission to BigStockPhoto has been accepted! There isn't any feedback about it but I wasn't expecting any unless it was rejected.

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Assignment Summary

2008-11-05T17:12:18+01:00

I have submitted my final image to bigstockphoto.com and am currently waiting for it to be approved/rejected. I think it will most likely be approved because i've met all the requirements and I can't see any major problems with it.
I chose this sort of design as my final idea because after doing research on bigstockphoto, the most popular sorts of images seems to be the simple ones. In many of the searches I made on the site, the most popular were photos of a full moon, or a water droplet for example, so I decided to combine the two together into one, so technically if it was sold, the buyer could choose to crop out either aspect of the image (though unlikely).
I think the final image turned out pretty much exactly how I wanted it to, it was a good combination of the three sketches I did initially, and i'm happy with the quality of the photos. Also, I think i'm satisfied that my first two initial ideas gave me the ideas I needed for the final piece, without them it would have taken a lot longer to get an idea for what to do.

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Final Assignment Submission - Part 3

2008-11-04T22:09:46+01:00

To get the lighting right, I decided I first needed to make the sea a lot darker, because at night there would be very little visible. To do this I decided to duplicate the sea layer and set the layer on top to Multiply, as this darkened the image a lot and also helped to reduce some of the brightness from the reflected clouds, as they were a bit too light before.
Although this helped to make the sea bluer and darker, it didn't really look like it was being lit from the sky by the moon. To achieve this, I found the best way was to add a new layer and use a gradient from white to a light blue, then set the layer style to Saturation.
This basically changed the shade of blue on the sea layer so that it was brightest towards the bottom of the photo and slightly darker at the top, closest to the moon.
This way, I decided to make a specific layer later for highlights, as it's easier to do if you have a single layer for each part of the image, rather than having to control shadows, highlights etc on a single one.
To create this effect I used a soft brush and painted a oval on the new layer, and set it to Overlay. Moving the layer around now was the easiest way of checking where the highlights/lighting looked best, because the luminosity would change depending on the light levels of the layers below.

Finally I decided that clouds were needed around the moon, as the area currently looked a bit blank with only the moon there. After a lot of searching I eventually found a suitable photo I had taken during a storm which had some good clouds in it. I erased the area where the sea and moon would be and was left with the following:

I distorted this image a lot, and cut and replaced several parts of it so the clouds were evenly spread, because I didn't want them covering all of the moon or stars. After I had finished with the clouds I gave them a slight blue tint to match the rest of the photo, by adding a light cooling filter.
Finally, I looked at the whole image in great detail and made a few corrections to fix some pixellation (using the blur tool) and places where the lighting looked unrealistic (by changing the light levels for the individual layers).
This is the final image I ended up with, which I think i'm pretty happy with overall. As always, it has been resized to fit the page so the original is much higher quality and resolution.

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Final Assignment Submission - Part 2

2008-11-04T18:17:23+01:00

The second stage of the image was completing the top half which involved adding the moon, stars and clouds. This was a bit easier than the first stage as I already had the photos and not a lot of editing was necessary.
For the stars I used an old photo I took on a clear night with a 15 second exposure time, which I then edited to increase the light levels and make the stars more visible.

As for the moon, I took several photos through my telescope at home and got some crisp and clear photos without any cloud pollution. After looking at a selection in Photoshop I decided on one to use:

I experimented with these two images and various other layers and filters until I had them arranged how I wanted them. I decided that i'd give the whole image a "blue theme" since the water was blue anyway and the moon could be a blue moon. So I added a cooling filter and changed the light levels for the moon to make it look as if it was brighter and giving off more light. Also, I gave the stars a very slight blue tint although it's barely noticable.

Finally I started trying to get the lighting right to make it look like the sea was being illuminated by the moon.

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Final Assignment Submission - Part 1

2008-11-04T15:12:24+01:00

Moving onto my final submission for the Creative Technologies module, I decided to take my favourite parts from the ideas I had had so far and combine them. This was basically:

Mock Idea 1 - Night lighting
Mock Idea 1 - Moon image
Mock Idea 2 - Turning water into an ocean effect

After this I decided to do some rough sketches of what I could do to incorporate these elements.

To begin, I started off with a photo of water that I hadn't yet used, which needed enhancing and level adjusting before I could start editing it further, as it looked very murky and undersaturated.

I thought it would be a good idea to add the clouds reflections early on so distorting the image later would be easier. I used the same photo of some clouds that I used in the previous mock idea, as they were what I needed and I don't think the conditions outside were suitable to take more photos when I wanted to do the work anyway. The clouds were added on top as a new layer and set to soft light. This effect was very useful as it cancelled out the blue sky in the background of the clouds, so the only colours were the water and the white clouds.
Also, because of effects I had applied earlier to enhance the original photo, the top of the water was too bright, so I cleared that up with the healing tool and by distorting the middle of the image with the warp tool. This is what I ended up with:

I repeated the same steps as with the previous mock idea by putting the whole image into a different perspective, using the Transform > Perspective tool.

From here I copied and pasted the image twice so I had copies on the left and right of the image. Here I used the same technique as with the mock photos. I think it worked a bit better with this photo, or it may just be that I spent more time on it. In the next screenshots you can see the Warp effect I used, and the result. The second screenshot shows the boundaries between the different layers after being warped. By this point I had about 10 layers, and I was on my fourth PSD save file.

To finish the main water section of the photo I looked over all of it and slowly corrected all the errors in my warping where waves merged into eachother and looked wrong. I also softened the top of the photo of the water to make it look more realistic, because the sea looks like it slowly fades out rather than suddenly stopping at one point. I also added a black background behind the water layer so everything else in the image at that point had a dark background to prepare for adding the moon and stars.

Moving onto Part 2.

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Mock Idea 2, Final Images

2008-11-01T19:55:18+01:00

For this mock idea I decided to focus more on something that could potentially sell well on a website like Bigstockphoto, as my previous idea was only really experimenting with light etc, it's unlikely anyone would buy it or be able to use it for something.
After researching on bigstockphoto it looked like even very simple images of water sell fairly well, the most popular being simple water droplets or photos of fairly clear and calm water.

As I already had a set of photos I decided to use what I had rather than going out and taking more to copy more popular examples. Also, submitting my current images would be a bit of a waste, as I hadn't done anything particularly clever with them in Photoshop, apart from changing the light levels and saturation.
I experimented a bit with the few images I had, and decided to combine several of the water photos and add certain effects to see how it would come out.

Starting with this image, I cut the top off and duplicated it several times so I had 3 of the same image. After inverting one of them I erased most of the left hand side of the image with a soft brush so it would match up better. Next, I used the Warp tool to distort it so it looks almost like there were waves and aligned the two images better.

This gave the photo a slightly stretched effect, but it's barely noticable and in a way makes it look more realistic because there is more space between the waves. Also the distortion makes it less obvious that it's the same image that's been duplicated.
After putting the finishing touches (blurring and use of the smudge tool) to make it look more realistic, I did the same on the left hand side of the image. With this one I did not invert the photo horizontally, so I just erased out the black water at the bottom right, as it would be hard to restore it to its original colour.

I distorted this until I was satisfied with it, then cropped the whole photo down to get rid of the unnecessary parts of the image that were too heavily distorted, like at the top. After this I used the perspective tool to make it seem like there was a more visible focal point, which almost makes it look like an image of the sea like I was aiming for.

Next, I took one of my other water photos and selected an area to add into the main image. Once I had copied it across I distorted it using the warp and perspective tools to fit the shape of the main image, and set the layer style to Linear Burn as it gave added texture to the water.

I also thought i'd try to get a reflection of something in the water to make it more interesting, and looking through my photos I decided to use a photo of some clouds. I made a selection and feathered it so it would blend better and copied it to my main image.

Even after changing the blending style to something that looked realistic like Pin Light and setting the opacity to 70%, it still didn't look right. The main problem was the that clouds weren't distorted enough, so they looked like they were just laying over the top of the waves, rather than being slightly distorted by them.
To fix this I applied a "Plastic Wrap" filter to the clouds which gave the layer a more defined texture, and also "Ocean Ripple" distortion. Usually I don't like using these types of Photoshop effects because it makes it feel less like my own work because they're just automated effects, but this wasn't exactly my final piece so I used them anyway.

Somewhere along the way I also duplicated the main water layer and set the new layer to multiply to give it a better contrast and colour. I also decided to apply a light plastic wrap filter to it as well which helped make the waves more visible, as the detail was becoming lost amongst all the other layers I had on top.
After this I added a few more effects, improving the lighting/highlights by adjusting the light levels and using the burn/dodge tools, and came up with this final image.

Obviously, this couldn't be submitted to bigstockphoto because the perspective is a bit distorted and the image is not complete. But it did help give me ideas for my final submission.

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Mock Idea 2, Test Photos

2008-10-28T17:16:14+01:00

This week's workshop was focusing only on the assignment that's due in on the 6th November. Following the previous test photos and mock idea I still wasn't sure if I wanted to submit any of them as a final piece, so I went outside with my camera during the workshop and began work on my second mock idea.
For this I decided to use water as a primary focus in the image, so I got several different photos and returned to edit them in Photoshop. After looking at them, several could be immediately deleted as they were grainy, noisy and beyond repair. I decided to keep 4 of the best for later use. These were mostly undersaturated and had lighting problems, and in many of them there leaves in the water so these had to be edited out.

The following images are comparisons between the original photo and the final photoshopped version, but have been resized for display and upload limit purposes:

This photo was a test to see how the water would look if it was not directly focused on it, and therefore wasn't as detailed. This would be useful in future simply as a layer mask if water in another photo needed extra texturing. In this photo the light levels have been adjusted and the saturation increased.

This photo is deliberately oversaturated and has a very high contrast. This is because I only intend to use this photo for the water, so the sky, buildings and general lighting can be disregarded. A mild cooling filter has been added to this photo to make the water look as if it is reflecting a clear blue sky, and this has its advantages over simply increasing the saturation, as there is no chance that artefacts or noise will appear.

In this photo I have greatly increase the saturation, added a cooling filter and adjusted the light balance to make the image look more appealing. For example, you can see at the lower right of each photo that the darkness levels have been adjusted so blacks appear darker, and a similar effect has been applied to the whites. I think this gives the photo a more professional look, as there are examples of both extremes (perfect white and perfect black) in the image.

After experimenting with the above images during the workshop I continued the work at home, and put togther a second mock idea that could be used as a final submission.

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Mock Idea 1, Finished Image 3 of 3

2008-10-24T15:13:17+02:00

For the final image I wanted a type of lighting that was completely different from the previous two.

Lighting 3 - A moonlit night

In this image I decided to take nearly all lighting out, and then add my own for the moonlight. To achieve this, I firstly painted over the sunspot at the top of the photo because there would obviously be no sun in this photo. Next I altered the light levels to reflect the amount of light that would be visible at midnight, which was basically nothing so the darkness levels were increased a lot.

To give the main look that the path was being lit by moonlight, I created a new layer with a dark-light blue gradient and set the layer settings to "Overlay". This was a bit too intense so I reduced the opacity of the layer to 80% and changed the brightness.
After this I changed the light levels of the leaves in the foreground and several of the buildings in the background so they were a bit brighter, then using the Hue/Saturation options I increased the saturation to +20, with "Blues" selected because I didn't want it to affect all the RGB layers. This made it look a lot more realistic because the parts that were already bright in the image stayed the same brightness but had a blue tint as if it were being lit by blue moonlight.
Next I decided to put the moon in the place where the sun had been, so I found some old photos I had of the moon and created that as a new layer. After changing the Shadows/Highlights options, I made the moon appear brighter than it first was to give the illusion that it was giving off a lot of light. I also duplicated the layer and gave it a blue Hue and set the layer options to Multiply, which created the effect of a "blue moon".

Finally, a cooling filter and moon beams were added to the whole image so the lighting appeared more natural and the filter balanced all the light levels in the image so nothing appeared over or underlit.
The final image has been scaled down to fit the page, so quality has been lost as well. The original, full resolution image will be on the CD when it is submitted.

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Mock Idea 1, Finished Image 2 of 3

2008-10-23T22:56:43+02:00

After finishing the first image that focused on lighting at midday I moved onto my second image.

Lighting 2 - A vivid sunset

For this second image I wanted to create the feel of a sunset, which was not at all easy because for a start the sun was in the wrong place for a sunset. However, since the main point of creating these images was to be experimenting with lighting, rather than editing scenery in a photo, I decided to leave the sun where it was and work around it. The only downside to this is obviously that it meant the final photo did not look as realistic as a real sunset.
Since the image was not going to look realistic anyway, I decided to make the colours and lighting a lot more vivid and intense that it would usually, just for the purpose of making the photo more appealing.
The main aim of this photo was to be a lot darker than the first, allowing me to bring out shadows and detail that I originally edited out of the daytime image. Firstly I removed all the colour from much of the foreground such as the leaves, and changed the light levels to make them appear a lot darker. I think this made the image a lot stronger as there was now a heavy contrast between the dark leaves and the bright sunbeams breaking through them.
I decided to include the original clouds in this photo as well because a plain sky didn't look particularly interesting when compared to the rest of the photo.
Several simple orange-yellow gradients were added with the layers set to Color and Linear Burn, as these gave the impression that the ground was being lit by this colour, rather than being heavily masked.
This technique works a lot better than simply changing the Hue of the original image, because it applies the colours differently depending on the RGB levels, rather than just shifting the colour along the spectrum, causing some colours to become distorted and creating artefacts/noise.
Finally, several more layers were added with orange-yellow/red-yellow gradients around the sun, which gave the sun the burning effect that you usually see at sunset when it is lower in the sky. Several cleanup layers were created which I used to go over the whole image a last time and make any small changes to lighting or to blur anything that looked noisy or grainy. The final image has again been scaled down to fit the page:

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Mock Idea 1, Finished Image 1 of 3

2008-10-23T18:19:32+02:00

Continuing from Part 1, I now had a single image that was very large in size and very good quality. At this point I decided on the final part of my first idea, which would be experimenting heavily with lighting. For this first mock idea I would create 3 different images from the one I had just created, representing different times of the day. These would be the following:

Lighting 1 - A typical bright sunny day.

This meant a clear blue sky without any clouds, few shadows, and generally a fairly bright and warm looking photo. Looking back this was most likely the easiest of the three, for the main reason that the photo was taken around midday, so the lighting was already fairly close to what I was aiming for.
To achieve this desired look, I first cleared up the clouds in the photo using a mixture of the Eraser and Healing Brush tools both set to very low softness. This was obviously because when dealing with clouds it looks more realistic if there is a soft edge.
After this I decided to work on the heavy shadows particularly on the brick wall and pathway as these were too dark for what I was aiming for. These were easily changed using the "Shadow/Highlight" tool and by adjusting the light levels. This made the photo a lot brighter and meant that much more detail was visible, particularly the bricks on each side of the railings.
Finally, I created several more layers and used these to increase the sun's brightness and contrast, for example, a yellow circle placed on top of the sun with the layer set to "Color Burn" created the impression that the surrounding leaves were being heavily lit by the sun's brightness. After applying this effect and many others to various buildings and other parts of the photo that needed extra lighting, I added a weak warming filter to the whole image which gave the photo the look I wanted. The final image has been scaled down a lot to fit the size of this page, and has lost a bit of quality as well. The original resolution image will be included on the CD when it is handed in though:

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Mock Idea 1, Test Photos

2008-10-23T16:34:16+02:00

So today looked like a nice enough day, and I decided to climb to the top of the steep hill in Lincoln to get a good set of test photos for my primary idea. This basically involved a lot of clear blue sky, and a panoramic view of Lincoln. This proved to be harder than expected, as it was fairly cloudy by the time I got to the top, and it wasn't easy to find a good spot where there was a good view without houses blocking it.
When I eventually found a good place I found it didn't look as good as I had hoped. The photos had no real point of focus, and even using the rule of thirds there wasn't really anything spectacular about them. In Photoshop I cleared up some lighting issues, although the sun at the left was irrepairable, and a warming filter was added to give the photo a nicer tone:

Fortunately there was a place nearby where I decided to get some different style photos, where the setting and point of focus was quite different to my original ideas. I took approximately 15 photos altogether, but decided to use the best 5 to stitch together in Photoshop. I picked these 5 because they each had similar lighting, making the stitching process a bit easier, because several of the photos I had deliberately under/overexposed would have required their light levels changing before attempting to make a single image from them. I included a photo of the sky with clouds in my selection as well because the sky in my current photos had the sky slightly overexposed meaning there was a lot less detail and a clear sky would be boring to look at:

Using these 5 images I managed to make a single image in Photoshop. To achieve this, a lot of the photos had to have parts erased or distorted because the view wasn't exactly the same in each one, and there were parts where you could see the same building or part of the railing twice at different angles. This is the final image I arrived at after all the editing, but this is without changing any light levels, saturation or colour and is by no means the final product:

As you can see the image is now a compilation of several photos, although it lacks atmosphere and is very bland. Several of the walls are underexposed and have too many shadows. The following image shows the boundaries of each photo in the final image.

I should probably split this into 2 blog entries, it's getting a bit long and i'm coming close to the word limit for this entry..

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Creative Technologies Workshop 4

2008-10-21T13:00:00+02:00

In today's workshop we were working mainly on our main assessment, so there's nothing really to upload for this workshop. Apart from the assessment we were looking at data types/files formats and experimenting with different forms of compression. In summary, and for my own future reference:

JPEG - Lossy
High compression, wide selection of image qualities, but doesn't maintain transparency.

PNG - Lossless
Lower compression, maintains transparency

TIFF - Lossless
Very low compression, almost no data is lost.

GIF - Lossless
Supports 256 indexed colours, maintains transparency. Can contain multiple images/frames.

PSD - Layered
Contains original layers and effects, can save to any format.

EPS - Lossless, Vector
Used for Vector programs, image can be resized with no loss in quality/pixellation.

(Usual) Image sizes:

PSD > TIFF > EPS > PNG > GIF > JPEG

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Creative Technologies Workshop 3 - Part 1

2008-10-14T13:00:00+02:00

In the first part of this workshop we had a series of 5 photos, which were all the same and all of the same building, but they had been taken at different exposures. We simply had to take the best bits of each image and put them together to make a single image, with all parts of the photo in good focus, exposure and colour.
This wasn't particularly tricky, but that might just be because i'm used to doing stuff similar to this in Photoshop. The final resolution was 476x718 which included large previews of 4 of the 5 used under/oversaturated photos so you can compare and see what was taken from each image. The photo was saved as a PNG for high quality purposes at 683KB.

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Creative Technologies Workshop 3 - Part 2

2008-10-14T13:00:00+02:00

After finishing the first part of the workshop fairly quickly I started the second. Using the 5 sample images from Blackboard, I stitched together a complete panorama of a street with houses. This was actually quite challenging, as some of the images were at completely different angles, making it very hard to match up certain parts of the images where they were different views of the same image. This certainly made the stitching process a bit harder.
In addition, several photos had halves of a car in them, where the next/previous photo didn't, so there was no complete image of the front and rear of a car in some cases. Some of these were fixed by taking parts of the pavement/road from other photos and simply covering the car up and using the healing/patch tool a lot, and ended up working fairly well.
This image essentially consists of 5 images all stitched together, so the resolution is an above average 4476x1675. This obviously makes a PNG at full quality a lot larger at 12.8MB, which is far too large for uploading to most image hosting websites such as Imageshack.us or Imagehosting.com. In this case, quality is not as important as image size, so saving as a JPEG with "High Quality" makes sense as it only very slightly reduces the image quality, but the image size is reduced to only 1.73MB.

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Creative Technologies Workshop 2

2008-10-07T13:00:00+02:00

Started this during the workshop using Photoshop 7 then decided to finish it in my own time at home on Photoshop CS2, which took about 3-5 extra hours including various distractions.
Took several more images from google, edited and resized the rock and smoke, then slowly added effects.
Several texture adjustments were made to the rock and smoke to make them look more realistic, and several colouring/gradient layers were drawn over the meteor and set to different blending styles, some directly duplicated to enhance saturation.
After looking at some references, I drew in some shockwaves (duplicated and edited with gaussian blur, moderate radial blur) , heat distortion (increased saturation and contrast, and a weak spherize filter) and smudged the original city layer to give the effect of a nuclear blast.
Finally, a gradient layer set to Overlay with weak opacity was added to correct the rest of the image, giving the impression of extreme heat and light. Several other effects were added to increase the realism. The final image had approximately 45 layers, and a copy of the PSD was saved in case changes ever needed to be made with access to the individual layers. For viewing purposes the image was saved as a PNG for lossless quality. This made the file size slightly larger but still only 1.43MB, as the resolution was a fairly small 1024x768. The original PSD however with all uncompressed 45 layers was 23mb.

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Creative Technologies Workshop 1

2008-09-30T13:00:00+02:00

Using Photoshop 7's blending tools, I took 2 images from google of a lizard and a dog, and merged them together using various tools to make this final image.
Firstly, Hue and Saturation helped greatly when editing the dog's head to give it a similar look to the lizard's. Next, I used the blur and gaussian blur tools a lot, especially around the edges of the dog's head to remove pixellation, and to create a more realistic look.
Finally, after creating a new layer with a portion of the lizard's skin, I changed the layer settings to "Overlay" and positioned it on the dog's head to give the look of scaly skin, replacing the original fur. Various saturation changes were made and the healing tool was used to make it look more realistic.
When I started this, I wasn't expecting it to be particularly important, so I didn't pick an image with a particularly high resolution. The final resolution is 415x332, and is saved as a PNG to keep the quality lossless and high quality. This obviously made the file size a bit larger, but since the resolution is so small the final size was still only 256kb at maximum quality.

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