| Hello again, I'm back
with another little tutorial just showing off some things
I've learned and forgot to share. In this little tutorial
I'm going to be talking about a few things. One of them is
gradients and the other is filling in a ground texture quickly
and painlessly.
Little note, I'm still
only using Photoshop 5.5, I have 7 but really, there is no
point. I've learned the hell out of 5.5 and I know all the
shortcuts. So this tutorial may vary depending. Also, remember
to use layers, every step I do is pretty much a new layer
in my image. Layers are you're friends. |
| So first off, gradients.
Now I know I told you never to use them unless you knew what
you were doing. Well, now I'm going to show you how to use
them intelligently. At least in my opinion.
Ok we need a background,
lemme draw something quick:
There we have
some houses or something. Now let's say I want to have a gradient
background in there for some reason, it's night time it'll
be blues and then we'll add some stars in there... First,
however, the gradient.
Here is the
background with a gradient in it... An ugly ugly gradient.
Now this image right here is 256 colours, not good for a low
res game. So let's knock that image down a bit. Here's the
tricky part: |
| When optimizing an image
in photoshop, I never trust the program to choose the right
colours. It would more than likely [if there were more colours
in this image] give all the colours to the blues and start
taking away other colours. So what we do is take the gradient
parts and select them.
Then we open a new image
and paste the gradient into it. Now, we go to Image, Mode,
Indexed Colour and say yes to flattening layers. Now, in the
dialog box that appears, change the palette to Perceptual
and the number of colours to 10 and the dither to Pattern
This is what
I have:
Then I select
the gradient again [just select the white and then invert
the selection CNTRL-SHIFT-I] copy and paste it back into the
scene for this:
detail
|
| I'm just gonna do the
windows now and then I'll get started on the stars.
As you can see, I added
a little window pane to the window on the left.
Ok 24 colours, doing alright.
Now the stars, here's a quick and easy way to do stars. Create
a new layer and fill it black. Then go to Filter, Noise, Add
Noise, set it to about these settings:
Make sure it's monochromatic.
Then create a new curves adjustment layer and fiddle with
the nodes until some stars are bright and most stars have
faded.
Here are my settings:
And here are my stars.
|
| Now, merge the curves
layer and the stars layer and then place the stars layer over
the sky layer. You do have these on seperate layers don't
you? This is why layers are such awesome things. Change the
star layer's blending to Screen:
And I get this:
click for larger
Not the best
image in the world, but I think it works for the purpose of
the tutorial. |
| The next part will be
applying this technique in a slightly different way, plus
I'll introduce you to another function of Photoshop.
home - back - next |
