Testing how to add movement to my comic book photos

 Hi All,

One of the benefits of having trouble sleeping is that you sometimes have a lot of time to watch videos and learn how to do things.

It occurred to me that I should see how I could animate my comic videos more. So I watched a bunch of youtube videos on animation, rotoscoping etc.

It turns out that there is a time line view for photoshop and your layers can become video segments. My daughter, the animation major, was all like "duh, dad!"

Anyway the gist of it is this. cut out your subjects and put them on their own layers. Do a content aware fill to get a subject free background, and clean up as necessary. Then you can make copies and move them and resize them and drag them into video groups.

This is obviously clunky, I'm doing a position change per second in a 5 second video, so it's very basic. I just wanted to see if I could actually do it. It tried another method converting things into 3D objects,  but I couldn't get it to work for some reason. I'm also not really understanding how to utilize key frames.

Here's the video from Youtube.

Enjoy.

Camera Raw in Photoshop for tweaking comic photos

 Hi All,

I had one of those "Doh!" moments the other day.

Why wasn't I using Camera Raw to adjust image exposure in these cellphone shots?

As per usual I think I had done things differently in the past and as I got more involved in making comics and switching from DSLR to cellphone I lost some of the technique along the way.

When using DSLR I had always adjusted the RAW images in Lightroom and then exported as JPEG. When I first got into using the Cellphone again I used Snapseed to do something similar. But honestly it was a little bit of a pain doing that on the phone.

I knew about Camera Raw in Photoshop but I didn't remember how to access it. I don't use Adobe Bridge to manage my photos.

So I Googled it.

So we open up our same example photo.

Then Shift+Ctrl+A to open Camera Raw. You now have a Lightroom like menu to make adjustments.

Then I just apply my standard base adjustments. Bring the Highlights all the way down, Pump the Shadows all the way up, and then adjust the Exposure to center the Histogram and pull the Whites and the Blacks back out.

So a big improvement. I could also pump up the saturation, but I could do that with an adjustment layer later as well.

Anyway, it's fun to remember ways to do things that you kind of forgot about.

Happy hobbying.