My Blog List

Showing posts with label Brighton Pavilion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brighton Pavilion. Show all posts

Friday, January 20, 2012

Photoshop Ice Sculpture

Making A Clear (Ice or Crystal-like)
Object in Photoshop Elements

 1.     Find a picture you’d like to convert.  Like a Regency Mail Coach.

2.    Select & save selected item in foreground, delete background. Best to have individual selections of different parts, such as “selection of horses”, “Selection of Coach WHEELS”, “selection of coach w/o wheels”, “Selection of People”, so you can control the amount and direction of light source.

3.   Use Sharpen filter for details you want to be prominent.  Use “Reduce Noise” filter, and/or eraser to smooth out areas you want to look smooth & icy.

4.   Set your pallet Background Color to Dark Ice-Blue/light blue, or Black/light grey. It doesn’t matter what color is on top of pallets.

5.    Select objects.  In this case I just selected the horses.



 6.   Go to “Sketch” filter and apply “Bas Relief”, with “detail” at max and the “smoothness” feature adjusted to your preference (about 1/3 of the way up the scale for this picture).  Use “left” or “right” light-source to highlight.  Other light sources (upper left, bottom, etc) don’t seem to work too well.

 









7.    When you’ve made the whole drawing into a “Bas Relief”, duplicate it 2 times.   Make the 2 top layers invisible.




8.  On your LAYERS Pallet, select the bottom layer (#1) of the Bas Relief Object. Go to the upper right corner of the LAYERS pallet and check “Luminosity” filter. Leave “opacity” at 100% for now.  Later you can adjust it to 75-85% if needed.
 9.   Leave the “Luminosity” layer visible.

10.  Select the layer directly above the “Luminosity” layer (layer 2). 

11. Go to upper right menu on this LAYERS pallet and click on “Screen” if your background is dark.  Slide the opacity scale to about 50% or lower, depending on how much transparent area you want.  This works best with darker backgrounds. This will lighten the already light areas as well as make translucent areas.  If you want completely transparent area you can simply erase or delete the area. 

11b.  If your background will be light, use the "Darken" mode along with adjusting opacity down.



12.  Place a colorful image in the Background.  I chose an old map of England.





13. Here is the stage-coach with a different background:


14.  To add some rainbow-sparkle, SELECT the 3rd (so far unused) stage coach layer.


15. Go to the “Effects” menu/pallet.  Chose a highly   colorful spectrum Effect.  I chose “Nebula” for this sample, tho I don’t think the latest Photoshop Elements has it (I’m still using #6).

 16.  Lower the OPACITY to around 15-25%.  This can go under or over the other stagecoach filters, whichever looks best to you.



So the important filters to use in making an object
translucent are:  Sketch/Bas Relief, "Luminosity" and/or 
"Screen" or "Darken" with very low (about 15%) Opacity.
 After than you can do anything.



Thursday, November 24, 2011

Brighton Pavillion Cake

Here is a beautiful Brighton Pavillion Cake from "Iced Gem Cakes"
http://www.icedgemcakes.co.uk/brighton-cakes/royal-pavilion-brighton-cake
via "Cake Wrecks"

Brighton Bandstand Cake

    
Brighton Pier Cake
Sandcastle Cake

Friday, September 23, 2011

Regency Christmas Card#2, 2011

Original Fashion Print
For this Regency Christmas Card I perused several Photoshop Tutorials on making a picture of an Ice Sculpture... they were either too complicated (30steps!), or the required filter  (3-D filter, scowl :-(  ) wasn't working on my computer.  So I've been "fooling around" switching between the easy Photoshop Elements and the slightly harder Photoshop CS4.  This Ice Sculpture came out quite realistic, I think, though it should be just a little bit more opaque.

I am working on stylizing the Brighton Pavilion background... adding snowflakes, that sort of thing.  Also, I think I'll write down the various steps I used and hope to repeat the process and results!

Ironically, the least realistic item in the picture is the ice cube the lady is posing on- and it is a photo of a real ice cube.