Book Covers

My next final this quarter is from my photography fundamentals II class, which focused on the digital side of photography, that being Lightroom and Photoshop CC.  Thankfully at our school, we get he entire CC suit for free as students.  Unfortunately, as soon as we graduate, it expires.  So while I have it, I'll use it.

Many of you may already know I am very familiar with Photoshop already.  I used to work at National Geographic doing image editing, everything from retouching to restoration and archiving.  I even managed to do some heavy compositing work for outside customers.  I also worked freelance for several years doing everything from cataloging to wedding albums and more.  So when I started taking a class on the fundamentals of Photoshop, I was skeptical I'd actually learn anything.  Well, I'm sure my fellow students got more out of it than I did, but I did actually learn some techniques and workflows that are very useful.

The hardest thing about this class for me was having to actually take my own photographs for everything.  Usually I'm handed a photograph, which already looks awesome because a professional took it, and I just have to make it look awesomer.  However, now I had to work with my own pictures, and discovered how hard it is to make something look good when it wasn't taken properly in the first place.  Several of these photographs turned out to be a little less than perfect, but that is why I am at school, to get better.  And once again I've learned a thing or two about taking pictures especially with the intent to take them into Photoshop to manipulate them later.

So for my final project, I had to pick 4 of the top New York Times Best Sellers and create new book covers for them.  I came up with 4 ideas, and 2 of them had to be redone (it's hard to go from a widescreen format way of thinking to a vertical book cover format).  The books I chose were Sycamore Row, Ender's Game (I do not support the ideologies or politics of the author), Identical, and The Racketeer.  These are not official, and only student work and I have no affiliation with the authors or the publishing houses or the New York Times.  I researched a little about each book to get an idea of what the story was about (I did not have the time to read the books themselves), and based my pictures off of that.

I will be posting more of my Photoshop work from earlier in this quarter soon.  So for now, Enjoy!

ACM SIGGRAPH Student Chapter

Hi everyone!
As some of you may know, I am currently the Vice-Chair of the SCAD Atlanta ACM SIGGRAPH Student Chapter, and one of the things we are trying to do is peer-education.  As such, I am teaching a short workshop on Adobe Photoshop, specifically a brief introduction and then working with selection tools, masking, and layers.  With any luck, I'll briefly go over non-destructive workflow habits as well.  So for right now, I am posting a few images I found online that we will use for the workshop.  And for all the SIGGRAPH members joining for the first time, welcome!

So the first files here are all the images we used in the demo to go over making selections, masks, and working with layers and layer order.  I touched a little on the idea of adjustment layers, but there were so many things I would still have loved to show, I may need to do more demos later.

At the bottom you can see the final SPACE COW image.  I do not own the rights to any of these, I only found them on Google Images for use in learning Photoshop.  See if you can make a space cow...

The Return of Photo Editing

So besides animation and visual effects, I've also been working on Photography, specifically Photoshop retouching.  Now I am very familiar with all the tools used in retouching in Photoshop, and I am familiar with many of the basic and advanced techniques used.  As such, I was worried I would be in a Photoshop class that would teach me nothing.  So far, while the class has been mostly review for me, I have learned a few of the more airbrushing techniques I haven't used before.  YAY, more to learn in Photoshop!

So right now, I have been learning portraiture retouching, working with multiple layers of edits and a variety of techniques that not only use a non-destructive workflow, but also provide flexibility to do edits I found tedious and difficult before.

So hopefully I will have 2 or 3 images to post soon.  I'll keep you all posted (I wanted to make sure everyone is alright with me posting them here before I do it).  And who knows, this could lead to some more freelance work or photography gigs.

An Intro to Shader Writing

So lately, I've been learning how to do shader writing.  What does that mean?  Well for anyone who uses Maya (or any other 3D software), the shader is the thing that lets you apply a texture or color to your geometry, and interacts with the lights in the scene, such as spec highlights, diffuse, glow, incandescence, etc...  Lambert, Phong, Blinn, and Phong E are all examples of shaders.  What I am just starting to learn is how to write my own shaders.  Eventually, I can even set these up so you can plug in the variables for the Maya users to adjust, to make it user friendly.
Right now, it really just looks like a grid, well a weave at this point, which isn't like any other shader I just mentioned.  It has none of the light-interaction controls yet, and the other shaders don't control patterns like this one does.  However, this is just a learning tool.
It has been really fun to program so far, and there is still more to do on it, but I figured I'd post what I have so far and let people see.  I plan to add more colors, and maybe another pattern to this.  We'll see how it turns out.

In other news, I have been doing some serious Photoshop editing, but I'll go into that on another post.  The long and short of it is, I haven't really learned any new tools in Photoshop since I started, but I did learn some techniques I have never used before (which is what i was hoping to learn).  I kind of wish I could take their advanced Photoshop class to really dive into it.  We'll see.

Photography assignment 1

This week we went over our photography assignment in my fundamentals 2 class.  The class is really focusing on Photoshop, something I am incredibly familiar with already.  This first project actually didn't involve any Photoshop at all, but did go over Lightroom editing tools I wasn't familiar with, so I am glad to have learned them. 

My concept for this project was to explore the interplay of themes at the Davidson Arabia Natural Preserve, specifically the nature aspects versus the derelict man-made structures that still riddle the area.  For now, enjoy the images.

Ubuntu

So this quarter my classes include 2 challenging ones, which will focus on writing shaders and materials with code, and my senior film.  It also includes one that focuses on Photoshop for photography, something I am already familiar with but it gives me the chance to make something with my skills that is all my own!  So you can expect to see a lot of pictures this quarter, but also work in progress toward my film.  It is going to be chronicled better on the official blog for the film, so I will probably include more of my other work here, such a the work I'm doing for Michelle Ionescu's senior film which I will be providing a link to the blog here as soon as it is up later this weekend.

So that leaves my materials class, which is going to be filled with a lot of code and scripting.  I'm actually learning Linux so I don't think I will show any of that stuff, but I will talk about it some.  It is actually kind of fun to navigate in Linux.  We are using Redhat at school, and most studios customize whatever Linux they are running, so it is best to be familia with more than one flavor.  To that end, I have spent the last few days preparing my computer and installing the latest version of Ubuntu on it, a more consumer level flavor of Linux.  I actually set it up to dual boot, but now I have to decide how far to take this.  What software should I put on which side?  How can I take advantage of Ubuntu the most?

Well for now I going to be getting a lot of practice with Linux, so don't be too eager to see any materials and shaders work just yet, it will come in due time.