#5 Brush settings are neat

To learn about the brush settings, I visited the Photoshop Essential's Brush Dynamics Tutorial here. I'm a big fan of Pascal Campion's work in Photoshop. He makes a digital painting in less than two hours each day, and it always ends up looking beautiful. The thing that gets my attention are the textures he's able to bring to his  illustrations. I'm pretty sure they're made using personalized brushes, so learning how this works is a big deal to me.

First of all, I need to explain what Jitter means. It's in most of the setting options, and I was pretty confused as to what it was. So now that I know, I can say this: Increasing the jitter of something increases the randomness of it.

Shape Dynamics- The first thing one can change in the brush dynamics window. It has the option to change the brush's size, angle, and roundness. They're all pretty self explanatory except for the roundness option. If you increase the roundness, the brush looks more like itself. If you decrease it, the brush will look flatter. So if your brush looked like 'O', decreasing the roundness will make it look like '()'.

Scattering- There are two options to understand within this option: Scatter and Count. Scatter means how far the brush will be scattered around the line you draw in. Count means the rate at which the brush will get repeated as you keep drawing.

Texture- This setting confuses me. I can just tell it requires texture files to do things, and I don't plan on bringing textures into what I'm doing for a while. So I don't have to learn this yet...

Dual Brush- This puts in a second brush of your choice inside the first brush. You can also choose the rate at which the second brush is applied, how big it can be, and how much of it there is.

Color Dynamics- The main thing about this setting is the Hue Jitter. This changes the color of the brush as it's applied. It creates a rainbowy look. The other parts of this setting pretty much just stem from that.

Transfer- This messes with the opacity. That's it.

Brush Pose- So supposedly, this setting changes the tilt/pressure of the brush, but since the tablet I have isn't tilt sensitive, I can't do anything with it. Whoops.

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These next settings don't have options within it. They're more like checkboxes. I'm cool with it, because I was beginning to think I wouldn't be able to remember all of this. I guess that's why I have this blog.

Noise- This just adds a more grainy look.

Wet Edges- I'm a bit confused by this brush, but as far as I can tell, it makes the brush have a lower opacity. It also makes the edge of the brush a bit darker than the inside of the brush.

Build-up- I have no idea. If it's actually changing something of the brush, it's not something noticeable.

Smoothing- I have no idea either.

Protect Texture- Like I said before, I'm not going to be messing with textures. I'm sure this has something to do with textures, but trying to use it with a brush that has no texture doesn't do anything to it.

I don't think I'm going to mess with these last settings. The options I ended up being more interested in were the ones on top. Anyway, now I think that I'm going to start rotoscoping!

I still don't know how to edit my layers on the timeline. So I had to set this gif to 60fps to make it work with what I wanted. Each picture lasts like 5 frames though. At least this one is less seizure-inducing.

#4 Tools and Layers

Hey.

How's your day been?

Why aren't you talking? It's okay to talk to a computer.

...

Yeah, if you talked, you're crazy.
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Anyway, sadly, I think I haven't explored more than twenty-five percent of the tools and layers part of PS. That's why this post is going to be all about that.

Just to be clear, I just talk about what caught my attention. This blog probably wouldn't be the best for beginners on the program, even though I only know about brushes and making new layers

SO.

Tools

The stuff that everyone is supposed to know how to use.

Note tool- This tool is to place small 'notes' on the document. I imagine it'll help to remind myself to fix anything or something like that.

Dodge/Burn/Sponge tool- If I want to add a simple shadow, highlight, or if I want to take away color, these tools would help. The dodge tool is to brighten areas up. The burn tool is to darken them. And the Sponge tool takes away the color. What's cool about these brushes is that the edges of the brush are blurred out, so the brush blends with the other colors.

Mixer Brush tool- This is one of the most useful tools I found just now. It's like the Dodge/Burn/Sponge tools, but I can choose the color and change the properties of the brush. I can't find these types of properties in the normal brush tool.

Pencil tool- It hasn't relatively been that long since I learned about this. I like this tool, because the bucket tool works with it. With a brush, if I fill in an area, it leaves a little white line between the border line and the color I tried to fill in. I hate that about the brush. But I think that the pencil is exclusive to line art. The pencil tool doesn't have an opacity property you can change, so you're stuck with the opaque versions of the colors you choose. This is unlike the brush tool, which has properties that help it blend with other colors.


Layers

Blending Modes-

I was looking at the blending modes for the layers (since I've barely touched them. Ever.), and I was a bit overwhelmed. So I visited this website I found:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/layer-blend-modes/intro/

I'm just going to copy and paste the most important piece of information I thought helped me understand the blending modes:

"...there’s really only five main types of blend modes. There’s ones that darken the image, ones that lighten the image, ones that both lighten and darken at the same time to boost contrast, ones that compare pixels between different layers, and finally, ones that affect either the color or luminosity values of an image."


It all clicked for me when I read that. The five blending modes are even separated between one another with small lines in PS itself. If it's still confusing, look at the article on the website. It's a little boring but helpful, nevertheless.


Blending Options-

I just stumbled upon this by double clicking a layer... I don't even...

A window popped up which shows you a lot of options to change the layer you selected. I don't think I'm going to have time to thoroughly go through this window. A quick pass through everything in the window made me realize this can be very helpful in creating shadows and highlights on the object of the layer. That's all.

Adjustment Layers-

I don't think I have to go through this. They're mostly used to change the color/tone of the layer. I think most of it is just for color correction.

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I think that's it for now.  The only other thing I want to focus on is brush properties. Maybe in here I can get the brush to have the same properties as the mixer brush tool.

12fps. Did this with the pencil tool. The color fills were really easy to use. It reminded me of the good old times in Flash. The blending options of the layers helped me make the shadow. It was so easy, I'm beginning to love what I happened to stumble upon!

#3 Going back to Kindergarten with Filters

Well here goes my next post.

This week, I became a little kid again and touched everything I could put my hands on. By that, I mean that I looked at everything Photoshop had to offer. I played with all of the filters,  tools, blending styles, etc, but I didn't think much about everything. I was just window shopping, seeing what would look good with what I would want to do. Some of the effects that I could make looked good, so I took a note of them here. Later, when I start making long animations, I can come back here and figure out what to do when I want to have a certain style.

I'll first write where to find the effect, then I'll write what one could do with it. Again, these are just effects I like. They're not everything Photoshop has.

Filters

Filter --> Filter Gallery... --> Artistic Folder --> Cutout

Self Explanatory. If applied to a picture, it will turn it into a sort of collage-looking thing. It makes the picture look like it was drawn. I could use it as a shortcut for making backgrounds, because it keeps the "animated film" style.

Filter --> FIlter Gallery... --> Artistic Folder --> Glass

Also Self Explanatory. This filter would, like Cutout, help with making the background, but I could also add it to an illustration instead. It takes a picture, then it puts an imaginary 'window' in front of it, creating ripples and bumps in the photo.

Filter --> Distort --> Wave...

This probably can do a lot more, but this filter could create a cool broken TV look. You know, like when the image looks barely coherent and it's getting wavy, then pixelated. It'd be hard to animate though, because it only changes the image. There's no option to animate it... Like every other filter.

Filter --> Blur --> Lens Blur...
There are a lot of blurring options, and all of them have a slight difference as to what they do. Lens blur, for me, would be the most ideal to use. There are a lot of small things you can change to the type of blur within this option, and it blurs an image like how a camera would blur its image.

Filter --> Noise --> Add Noise...
To those who know what noise is in movies, then you probably know why I would choose this. When selected, it adds a grainy, realistic look to the image. It adds more tone/feeling to the image, in my opinion.

Filter --> Render --> Lighting Effects...
I don't really know how to explain this. With this effect, you can highlight an area, and it'll turn brighter. The rest of the space will turn darker. It's like adding a 2D spotlight to the image.

There are probably more filters that I would want to use, but I was just testing all of them out with a picture I found in google images. Maybe some of the effects were made to better work with illustrations.

I want to make a gif for every post to keep honing in my photoshop skills. Sorry if I give seizures to anyone. This one was at 15fps.

#2 Got to start somewhere

I remembered seeing an article on Photoshop animation on www.Newgrounds.com, a website that's full of animations made on flash. This is where it's at. As of now, there's a part one and a part two. I will probably be using these articles very heavily. To start, I saw this video...

And I made this...

12fps animated on Photoshop with a tablet!

It's really cool. It's not as hard as I had thought. The only complicated part was making the actions. In Adobe Flash, there's default hotkeys for making a new frame and such. In photoshop, that doesn't exist, so you have to go through a huge process before you're able to make a new frame. Actions let you record the process. All you have to do is set up what you recorded to whatever button on the keyboard you want, then, when you press the button,  the computer goes through the process by itself in less than a second. It's like creating your own personal hotkey.

Next time, I'm going to focus on learning more about photoshop's tools. I feel like I still don't know much about the program besides the brush, eraser, and bucket (and, now, it's animation tools!).

#1: Intro to Me

What's up everyone. I'm Felipe. I'm creating this blog to capture my journey in learning how to animate in Photoshop and, maybe even, learn more about Photoshop. I have already used Photoshop to draw and paint, but I have never tried using it as a way to animate. That has always been an Adobe Flash thing for me. Flash was made for animation, and Photoshop was made for Editing Photos. It was later discovered to be a great tool for illustrating, and then it turned out to also be useful for animating.

I had never put too much thought into learning Photoshop. I didn't have the money to buy it, but then I saw all the great illustrations people were making with it. When Adobe CC came out, I snatched a student/teacher edition for a cheap price. I started learning Photoshop to draw/paint, and as I was watching tutorial videos for it, I saw that there were some animations made with it. That was the moment I realized Photoshop had an incredible capacity to create very original styles with Animation.

Now I want to learn everything about Photoshop. This blog will help organize my ideas and keep everything I learned in a nice, stored place. I'll update this every week with a summary of what I learned, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to do next week.  And I'll try to keep it interesting. It's boring when I try to force myself through a wall of text. It's painful. And who knows, maybe this blog will help anybody else trying to animate in Photoshop.

Animated in Flash with a mouse...