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74novaman wrote:Beautiful shots, TAM.

Are some of those HDR type layered shots?

Yes and no. All of those particular pictures were taken in 2004 and 2005, using a 3.5 megapixel pocket camera which did not have HDR capability built in. My current camera (nothing special, just a Nikon D3100 entry level DSLR) doesn't either. Those older images were shot to JPG, because that was what the camera's default setting was, but now I usually shoot to RAW. So, what I do is open the original image in Camera Raw, and output bracketed exposures based on the original—usually 3, but sometimes 5 brackets depending on the exposure and color saturation for the original. So that artificially creates the brackets that would normally be created by the camera software. Then I post-process the bracketed images through Photomatix Pro to create the single tone-mapped image. After that, I import the tonemapped image plus the bracketed images into PhotoShop as a layered file. I make a copy of the tonemapped layer and designate that as my working layer. Then I start using Topaz filters to copies of either the original brackets or duplicates of the tonemapped layer. Then I start painting from the various filtered layers onto the working layer until I've got the image that I want. Unless I plan to do something more with it, I almost never save the result as a layered PhotoShop file. Instead, I flatten it and output a high res JPG.

Sometimes I cheat. For instance, the grass in the foreground of THIS PICTURE appears also in the foreground of THIS PICTURE. The second picture was taken in December, and the grass was all dead, had been painted white for effect, and had wires and cables running all over it. So I imported a copy of the first picture as a layer in the second picture, and painted the nicer grass into the image and saved it that way. You can see some signs of cloning in the second picture if you look hard enough.

So the short answer is: I'm not shooting HDR, but I'm doing everything else as if it were HDR.

Sometimes I make music mix CDs and like to play around and make covers for the jewel cases. Obviously this one was based on the movie "Silence of the Lambs". Look into the eyes of the image on the left and you will see the face of the woman for who I made the disc. The lips came from a scan of a lipstick imprint.

The butterfly over the mouth on the right image is a clipart image that suggests the moth from the movie.

Photoshop has almost become a generic name for digital manipulation software. I prefer CorelDraw for most of my graphic work.

Bill, that's pretty cool.

This is one of those 3D Studio Max in front of the TV things. I can't say the concept of the image was all my own. I saw a picture of it and then replicated it in Max. Maybe it was a Dunkin Donuts craving who knows.

Here's another CD cover that I made for a mix CD for a Christmas present. This was inspired by Johnny Cash Live at Folsom. Of course, the Mavericks never played live at Alcatraz, but I thought that it might be a catchy title and cover. A couple of people thought that it was a real release and offered to buy the CD from my friend.

The Annoyed Man wrote:Bill, that's pretty cool.

Thanks TAM. It was a fun exercise.

urnoodle wrote:This is one of those 3D Studio Max in front of the TV things. I can't say the concept of the image was all my own. I saw a picture of it and then replicated it in Max. Maybe it was a Dunkin Donuts craving who knows.

Very impressive work.

This one isn't new, but I had a lot of fun making it.

I love the album covers. It reminds me of way back. When cassette tapes were still popular. A friend of mine and I used to cut things out of magazines and glue them together on cassette inserts. We would send our song mixes with the custom covers to our friend who was studying in Germany at the time. I never thought of stepping it up with photoshop on CDs. Very creative. You too TAM I see you are also far more advanced in photoshop than I am. I generally take 2 images and just morph them into one another. I really need to step up my game.

urnoodle wrote:I love the album covers. It reminds me of way back. When cassette tapes were still popular...

That reminds me of a Japanese guy that I worked with. He got to like American music while he grew up in post-WWII Japan by listening to armed forces radio. We worked together in Malaysia for a couple of years and we became friends. While in Malaysia, he had a record player and a small record collection that he brought from Japan. He listened to mostly old country and western - Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, some rock'n roll like Elvis and some jazz. Dave Brubeck "Take Five" was among his favorites [Mine also]. He didn't even own a cassette player, let alone a CD, but I made a large collection of cassettes for him which forced him to finally buy a tape player. I labeled the cassette cases and wrote all of the song titles using a cowboy-themed font.

A few years later, when he transferred to China, he sent me a fax thanking me for the music. During the week, after work, he was made to live in a dormitory on the manufacturing site. It said that he listened to the tape every night and that was how he relaxed after work. That made me feel the effort was worthwhile. I still have the fax. I am sure that he still has the tapes.

I'm still very good friends with the girl that was in Germany. She now lives on the east coast. We talk almost every Friday and it just so happens I just got off the phone with her. I took the opportunity to ask her if she remembered those old tapes. She told me yes she does because she still has every one of them and their covers. She pulls them out from time to time to listen to them. Her favorite was the one we put together from the soundtrack of 9 1/2 Weeks. I'm amazed she still has them, that's over 20 years ago.

I usually don't keep my photoshop images but I found this one while I was looking through some old CDs I intended to shred. I've gotten a little better with photoshop since then but not much.

Urnoodle, that is quite powerful. Well done.

Thank you. That day changed the world forever and I will certainly never forget it.

Sorry, I didn't mean to drop out of the conversation, but I've actually spent all day shooting and photoshopping some images for my son. He just got a job recently with a defense contractor who builds a very specialized weapon mounted optical device for the special forces community. So we took a bunch of pictures of it mounted on various rifles in a number of difference configurations, and I've rendered them into HDR, and spent the whole evening removing the background to create transparent images for print and web work. We had to improvise the lighting and backdrop since I don't have a studio set up at home, and removing the backdrop from the images has been nothing but painstaking scut work.

There's nothing artistic about this project, but the subject matter is pretty cool. I'll be posting copies of those pics in another thread when I'm done. It may interest the rifle crowd.....but suffice it to say that my son showed up with about $10,000 worth of interesting optical gadgets in a small plastic box. I now have a bad case of the "I wants."

74novaman wrote:I messed around with photoshop quite a bit when I was in high school.

These days, not so much.

My time waster while watching tv is surfing forums on my phone.

When I was in high school, Photoshop was an airbrush and ink pen.