February 2013 Video Tutorial - Advanced Image Retouching

[Gare]

It's Friday, and you should be really, truly pleased with yourself and your work, DCAHall (I've forgotten your first name! It is, again ____?)

You've shown improvisation, innovation, performing a well executed variation on the main theme.

You'd better watch it or others will start calling you an artist!

;)

My Best,

Gary

[BeanPole]

That is cool dcahall! I love the way you used the elliptical tool to make oval backgrounds, and love the reflections!

[dcahall]

Thanks for the nice words Gary. My name is Dave :-)

I feel like I am learning and am a good imitator but not read to accept "artist". Maybe that is the same thing as when I used to teach programming classes but did not consider myself a programmer.

Should have gone back and listened closer. Yes, you said spacebar and I just missed what you said. On the line gallery setting, as I said before, I thought that was what I had done but apparently I did not do it correctly because this morning I did it successfully.

[dcahall]

Thanks BeanPole - I also used used the mold tool.

[Gare]

Dave, I'm not going to beat you up trying to convince you that you have latent art skills.

You do the same, okay? Don't beat yourself up.

Me, I have people standing in line waiting to do it to me.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Hey, what is imitation other than learning how to do something exactly like someone else did, or at least to get the same results?

The key word there is "learning".

Before I went to school, I "imitated" (copied) comic book characters.

When I was in school, I did Life Study drawings. Again, copying what was before my eyes.

There's no difference except college costs more, and there's an instructor in the room.

-g

[stygg2003]

OK, one more post where I just could not resist some additional playing around and combining tutorials. This time I combined Gary's tutorial with Stygg's to come up with something kind of interesting (IMHO).

Attachment 94646

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Hi Dave,
really good drawing and inovation and this time, no mention of darts!

Stygg

[pauland]

Isn't it about time that that line on the horizon is gone?

[Gare]

@Dave—

Can you attach the file to a post so I can see how to get rid of that horizontal line of pixels for you, and then explain how everyone can do this on their own?

-g

[dcahall]

I have attached it. On another post I had gotten rid of it by overlapping the sky and ground slightly (about 5 or so pixels and using feathering so that it blended). I am posting both images and both .xar files for you to examine.

The SurrealBackgrounds files are my original files under Stygg's tutorial. I overlapped some of the images and feathered them to eliminate the blank line between the sky and ground portions. Gary, you will want to undue the Clip View to see the individual components. Hope that helps a little.

The FacesWBackground files are the ones I posted for your Advanced Image tutorial but I did not take the time to do any overlapping or feathering which I think would have done the job but I will await your feedback.

I also wanted to pass along to some others who commented about the elliptical background for the faces that I discovered that if you use True Color + Alpha when you create the bitmap copy, that is does not pick up any of the background in the new copy. That is what I used and then I added the elliptical background produced another bitmap copy (again using the True Color + alpha so the background would be transparent). I then made a copy that I set to the kind of dark bronze copy of the faces and ellipses , and then used the mold tool to put some perspective on the new image. I made a copy of that and flipped it horizontally so I would have the image for the other side and the rest should be obvious.

Again, I hope these will help shed some light on the whole subject.

[Gare]

Dave, thanks for sharing.

Wow, as far as I can tell what messed up your work was quite sophisticated!

Here's the deal:

First, you have your Nudge distance set up to a fractional amount, 3.8 pixels. That is bound to cause a hard line somewhere in your work. You can use 1 or 2 pixels but not 2.6, or 2.8, because Xara ultimately uses anti-aliasing when it has to write the image to file or to a bitmap export, and it then rounds fractional pixel values to the nearest integer, and it has to anti-alias an edge to some color or opacity, and this usually creates an edge or a line.

Second, you got groups inside of clipviews inside of clipviews. This causes a write problem that's not well-documented. When object groups become too complicated, and this means hierarchical nesting in addition to, say, extruding a shape that has 1,200 control points..."the math gets too hard" for Xara's internal rendering engine to display the result image accurately.

If you've ever had stuff go disappearing only to reappear when you zoom or otherwise refresh your screen, your shapes might be too complex, or you have groups inside of groups to the 12th power. I suggest this workaround: when you have a group of shapes you think are getting mathematically too complex, Ctrl+Shift+C to make a Bitmap copy, tuck your original group away, and proceed with the single, uncomplicated bitmap copy.

As I was taking the groups apart, Dave, it was kind of like pulling the proverbial thread on a sweater—it came undone, so my simple "cheat" was to make a bitmap copy of the background, slice it in two, hide the unwanted edge we got going in the composition, and then overlap the top piece over the bottom, then apply a very small, shallow linear transparency to finish a blend between the two pieces.



Oh, if there's a third here (!), your shapes weren't perfectly aligned, butted against one another at the horizon.

So we live and we've all learned here, I think.

By the way, I don't think anyone was paying close attention, but that is one kick-butt illustration of the boy. I assumed you'd traced the outline and just clipped the original photo.

People, look at this:



Holy moly! I used a Poser model because I didn't have the time, or most likely the talent to draw a surreal kid in time to create the tutorial! Look at the detail Dave put into this!

Go out drinking tonight to celebrate, man.

I'm serious.

Don't drive.

My Best,

Gary