Photoshopping

 Hi All,

I thought I'd take this moment while we're in between comic reports to talk a little about some of the things I'm doing to manipulate images.

The main thing that gives me the end result is the process of converting a photo image that I learned from the Photoshop Training Channel on Youtube here. I wrote about it on my blog here.

Right now my work flow is to paste new photos into the base layer smart object and then do all the edits in the smart object. It has all of the blood splatter, muzzle flashes, sky backgrounds etc in different layers. I've also put in a blank layer to use the clone stamp tool to fix distracting things in the images in a non destructive manner.

Here's a few examples.

So what we see here are the effects added and the distracting elements of game aids covered up via the clone stamp.

Again with the clone stamp because the perspective of the shot would have been weird to have sky there. Looks like I missed the sliver of table edge in the upper left corner.

Here the perspective was right for sky. I have four or five different sky images in a layer group that I reveal via a layer mask. I sometimes resize and reposition in a given series, but I don't change the base sky image for that particular comic. The background and table weren't super cluttered or distracting, but I thought it would help with the story immersion if I covered it up.

The other thing I'm going to be working on is more photo composites. This is the background I made for the MESBG comic page background. It's made from parts of seven images I found online. I tried the technique of color matching the elements except for the palantir. The only problem was I chose to match to the grey sky that ended up getting washed out in the comic process.

Anyhow, I'm going to start exploring with more photomanipulation and the process of "Photobashing" that concept artists use. I have a lot of bootstrapping to do to get comfortable with attempting to paint or draw digitally.

Next comic hopefully in a day or two.