Some assembly required
These three diptychs were made from the source images found in The Proper Tool for the Job. This collection of images was taken over several month with both a DSLR and Android phone. They were different sizes, resolutions and most had a shallow depth of field; everything that makes them decent individual images but something that makes composites especially difficult. I used ten of the thirty images from last weeks post to make the three composites shown here.
Graffiti on the Street
The inspiration for this image was the bicycle shop. Fabber cyclery on First St. near downtown San Jose was someplace I passed on the way home from work many times. It has a large Schwinn sign panted on the side and I always thought it would be neat to get a picture with my car in front of it.
This assignment came up and I decided now is as good a time as any.
This was shot on First Street near downtown San Jose at Sunset. One of the first things to do was clean up the side of the car through the doors. For this I used the pen tool and drew in the contoured reflection based on what I remember it looking like.
Next the sign and wires were removed using the Content Aware fill.
Then the back wall was whitewashed to make the canvas.
The HyperSprite lettering was done in Impact font and then converted to a path and stylized using the anchor points and direct selection tool. They were then seprated out to their own layers so the drop shadow effect would work properly.
The Mini in the lower corner is the same image that resides on this site at the top of the classic mini section. I used threshold to reduce black and white. Created a selection based on that painted it in.
The Yosemite Valley and Cat were drawn by hand with the aid of images while the guitar and names on the left were freehand.
Lastly, I copy merged and pasted to a new layer, flipped it vertically and transformed it to fit the contour of the window. I then made a mask to exclude the rest and that’s about it.
Pixel Bender from Adobe Labs for Photoshop
Ok, I have to admit, post to this site are few and far between these days. I am back in class and don’t really have time for my regular projects. So here is something I stumbled upon this morning tanks to a Google+ Photoshop CS5 stream post by Adrian Ellis about Photoshop Hidden Gems.
Pixel Bender is what got my attention. It is a Photoshop plugin that uses your computers GPU to process the image allowing accelerated rendering. Check out Bryan O’Neil Hughes video here that shows it off. Cool stuff!
That said, while trying to manipulate the photo above I observed 3 things. The first was rendering was lightning fast even with an 18mp image. The second was that while changing settings, my video went blank and I had to reboot and start over. The third was when I tried switching to CPU mode and I got tired of waiting for it to finish and canceled and went back to GPU rendering. After trying this out and seeing the difference in processing speed, it shows the future of Photoshop is GPU rendering.