blending

[necrocyte]

first thanx for hearing me out. now, i am making "tenacles" with paths, a stroking it in an alpha channel, and applying lighting effects on the layer for 3d effect... only thing is i have tons of these "tenacles" and the lighting effects are nice but leaving me with quite a job of touch-up, anyone know of a good(fast,easy) way of approaching this???????

thanx for the help

[necrocyte]

first thanx for hearing me out. now, i am making "tenacles" with paths, a stroking it in an alpha channel, and applying lighting effects on the layer for 3d effect... only thing is i have tons of these "tenacles" and the lighting effects are nice but leaving me with quite a job of touch-up, anyone know of a good(fast,easy) way of approaching this???????

thanx for the help

[Mark (theKeeper)]

Hi necrocyte, welcome to the Forum.

Well, i think that we'd have to know more specifically the exact effect you're trying to get - or seeing in your mind's eye - in order to give you any 'specific' suggestions. If you can enlighten us with a sample image maybe? Maybe one of what your mask looks like too? - so we can see just how 'busy' it actually is.

But... i can suggest 2 main things that are quite often done to images that utilize the Lighting Effects filter...

1) After running the filter on the target layer, invert the selection and hit Delete. Getting rid of any excess around the actual objects you ran the filter on.
(depending on how you set your layer up b4 hand, you may not need to do this)

2) If you've done step 1, then Ctrl-click the target layer to select it's contents (da tentacles), and run a 2-3 pixel Gaussian Blur on the objects. This can help smooth out any limps, bumps, gouges, or banding created by the Lighting filter.

NOTE: if you didn't do step 1 for any reason, then just load the Alpha channel you used to create the tentacles.

And above and beyond all this... you may just have to resort to working on smaller groups of tentacles at one time (or even individual ones), then combine them later on. That might be the only real way to create the best looking effect -- and it's the best looking effects that usually DO take more time/work; so don't let that phase you. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

That help?

[necrocyte]

thanx for the response [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] ... i tried adding a gaussian blur after the lighting effects, still looks pixelated, here is an image to help understand what i am doing
http://www.geocities.com/limpimpin/uglytens.jpg
i have been creating the tenacles one by one... so that should not be a problem, just that i am trying to avoid airbrushing each one... once again thanx for the help [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[Mark (theKeeper)]

aaa ok i see now.

Ya that's just a 'typical' effect from a 'Raster' image program. Only way to avoid that stuff is to make your image very large in dimensions. All that's happning basically is because of the size of the tentacle, photoshop isn't doing a good job of smoothing out that line shape.
But it'll do a better job if the tentacle (ala the image) is a lot larger to start with. You can scale it down to your needs afterward.

If you were working in an illustration app (hence a Vector format ala Illustrator/Xara) those lines would be very smooth.

So... that's what i suggest you try first then... use the Vector Shapes in PS6 (you using PS6? Forgot to ask that), for the tentacles, but don't Rasterize them; leave them in a vector format, and apply your effects then. Some filters though will request you convert the vector to raster. In which case... you're only real resolve is to redo the image starting at a much larger pixel size.

This all make sense?

[necrocyte]

thanx alot man, i did the tentacle in a larger image and scaled it down.... it looks great!!!

so simple, yet, i prolly would have never thought of it

thanx again