Topic awaiting preservation: Some sort of ramble

I'm exhausted, but I feel the need. Let's see if I can do this with out pictures.

I've been playing a way lot with Snowy Mask lately. What? I said Snowy Mask.

Not that hard to figure out.
Copy.
Blur.
Set to Difference.
Levels Ad-Layer, switching the bottom sliders to invert. Top sliders to taste.
Use the Move tool to move the Difference layer around, or nudge with the cursors.

To me, obvious variations include not inverting the bottom sliders in the Levels Ad-Layer. Or even using a Curves Ad-Layer and getting crazy with the Cheese Whiz. Or hitting ctrl + i on one of the layers.

Quick and silly variation:
Start with a photo. Might want to pump up the contrast and de-saturate.
Some Gauss.
Copy.
Invert.
Set to Difference.
Then copy the Difference layer until you get sick of it.

Oh... ahh...

'Course, don't have to start with a photo. Feel free to try Clouds/Difference Clouds. Or Gradient tool set to Lighten or Overlay or something. Or paint, then Smudge or Gauss. Or whatever. Mix-n-match, because it's all good.

Also good for animation spiffiness. I'm sure some of you remember that dohicky I did awhile back and never really got back to. All you have to do is move either the bottom layer or the layer set to Difference. Tada. Instant animated something. You can even colourize it using your favorite method, mine being a G-Map Ad-Layer.

A good thing to add is a mask in there. I usually use a Colour Burn layer just like Mahjqa's fire. This being under my usual G-Map Ad-Layer. But, this also means having to avoid pure white and pure black under the Colour Burn layer. Not to hard to fix with a choice Ad-Layer Levels or Curves.

Sure, it's cool to animate Snowy Mask. Can do all sorts of variations for a bunch of different looks or feels. One of my favorites is flowing circles of plasma.

Plasma? Yeah, can get a pretty decent plasma effect. Seems to be the rage lately to be doing plasma with Satin.

So I've been messing around with using Snowy Mask to put flowing plasma over an object. Easy with Satin, but Snowy Mask has a few problems. One of the challenges being getting two layers, the two with one set to Difference, to play nice with a background or object. If you add a Colour Burn layer to mask, it just gets that much messier.

Fix? Layer Set + Blending modes! Woohoo! It looks a little something like this:
Set 1 - set to Hard Light
- Mask layer, set to Colour Burn
- G-Map Ad-Layer to colourize. Colour sliders, left to right, something like: 50% gray - blue - white. Kind of an electric feel
- Levels Ad-Layer, tweaked to no pure white or pure black and rest to taste
- Difference, set to Difference mode
- Set 1 Background
Background

Then, in Set 1, either animate the Difference layer or Set 1 Background. There you go. Flowing plasma type junk over an object or photo or something.

I usually prefer setting the Set to Hard Light. Screen and others are spiffy to try, but you'll probably have to adjust the colours in your G-Map Ad-Layer if you are using one. Or adjust your colourizing using whatever methods you are using.

For the animating, moving something around is good. I guess the most common route is Euclidean(?) motion. You know, move something left/right or up/down. 'Course, with a repeatable pattern of some kind. But don't be so quick to discount tossing in Polar Coords for the motion.

Hmmm... Copy + Offset + Polar Coords = Good!
That's how the flamethrower variation was done with Mahjqa's fire. Right, Izzay?

But this time, I'm looking for a different kind of motion. A mix between a plasma globe and a Jacob's ladder. Imagine two points or spheres near each other. Now a stream of plasma connects them along the bottom. Then it travels up, around both points, and out the top. Kind of like two touching wheels that are spinning. Ya follow?

Yes, sounds like a job for Polar Coords, but how to do it? Not easy. You have to Offset and Polar Coords everything, then manually "fold" them. The magic is in the folding, and it it really boogles my mind on several levels.

Going to be using my numbers. No big deal. However, you have to make sure that your starting graphic or photo is top-bottom tilable. Left-right doesn't really matter, but top-bottom have to match. For me, it was a photo, Offset vertical only, and the Smudge tool.

Now, set the dimensions to 256x256. I turned off Constrain Proportions because it doesn't really matter if it's squished or not - as long as the top and bottom still match.

Copy, Offset vertical by 16.
Copy that, then Offset by 16 again.
Repeat using an Action that was recorded.
Total of 15 times or something.
Then Polar Coords using Rectangular to Polar.
Use ctrl + f to repeat on all layers.

Once done with that, the layers should have an animated fountain kind of effect. Pretty cool. Might want to stop there and mess with that. But I went ahead and folded them all.

Current doc is 256x256. By folding, I mean rotate the left and rotate the right so that the two different halves of the top meet. Duh...?

Okay, start a new doc that's 512x128.
Back to the Polar Coorded doc.
Select the left half, that is 128x256 on the left.
Copy.
Back to the 512x128 doc.
Paste.
Edit > Transform > Rotate 90 CW.
Move to the over to the left of the 512x128 doc.
Back to Colar Coorded doc.
Select the right half, that is 128x256 on the right.
Copy.
Back to the 512x128 doc.
Paste.
Edit > Transfrom > Rotate 90 CCW.
Move into place on the right.
Merge down.

I did that several times before I tried recording an Action to do that nasty grunt work. My Action recorded and ran just fine. All 16 of those layers cut and folded into the other doc with a few clicks. Very not bad.

New doc animated with the motion that I wanted. A bit "tall" in the middle, but it works as intended. However, I've only done this whole things twice, and I don't quite have all of the tweaks figured out just yet. I'm still not quite sure what kind of attributes I want my starting photograph to have. Now that I have several toss-away Actions recorded for the grunt work, I'm sure I'll have it figured out soon enough.

I'm sure in the next day or two I'll have a few full-blown examples.

I feel much better, now. I'm going to bed.
G'night, folks.

play.fiddle.learn

Pretty cool stuff. Thank you for posting it.

So Warj I gotta ask you a question.

Do you make notes ASyou're doing this stuff?

I sure as F%$! hope so. I'd be berry berry upset to learn that you wrote all that from memory AFTER you'd finished and just kinda looked at the image and the layers pallette and said... 'oh ya that was bla bla bla... '

Tell me it aint so. =)

Notes? Barely. For the above ramble, I did write down what I was doing wrong when I was fumbling with Polar Coords. I found myself doing the same thing over and over, so I wrote it down and crossed it out. After that, I quit making the same mistake.

I do have nearly of my notes for Tech-Slop available if you care to gander. For all of my tutorials, Scans are pretty all the notes I have.

When I go through rambles like this one and the rambles I did for Moth, the posts themselves are my notes. Write it down in a text file, post, and archive. Maybe later recycle them into a full-blown tutorial.

When I first started fiddling with PhotoShop, I did take a few notes. Then my head started to get the hang of things, so I don't really take physical notes any more. Past year or so, when I feel the need to document, I'll head over here and ramble.

Taking notes and fiddling does hit on something that I've been thinking about. I've been giving serious thought to writing down my fiddle sessions and posting them - mistakes and everything. Movie tutorials are too perfect and contrived. How about some movies of a different colour? You know, just messing around and stumbling on cool tricks and bad ideas? I know I would have a blast doing something like this with Polar Coords. Imagine something like "Play.Fiddle.Learn: The Movie". Heh.

Just a thought.

Anyways, here is an example of plasma circles that I'm so fond of:


I'll post an example of the Polar Coord motion later. I did some more messing around and I'm a lot happier with the results now that I understand it better. That is, I'm getting the hang of the tweaks.

LOL Really crappy, low-res fiddle with a face for the Difference layer.
Man, need to get in there and do some painting fixes.

Sweet stuff, Warjournal.

Thanks again. Can`t wait to go .fiddle

And people may say: "does it have any USE, save for just looking nifty?"

Used the effect on the first dolphin sig I made. Still looks nifty. War, think I'll be experimentin' with what you said.



[This message has been edited by mahjqa (edited 08-12-2003).]

does it have any USE, save for just looking nifty?

Does it need to do anything else?


"It's art, damnit!"