OxCreative
2009
It’s been a while since we’ve created a tutorial so here’s a quick Photoshop tutorial which you can do if you have Photoshop CS or higher to create a Bokeh/Particle effect – it’s similar to the blood effect tutorial we created some time ago.
Step 1
Open a new Photoshop document and set the background colour to black. We used a 1000px X 1000px document.
Create a new layer and from the brushes panel select a soft round brush – we used the 45 pixel brush (see below).
Step 2
In the brush editor, select ‘shape dynamics’ and set ‘size jitter’ to 100%. Next, (more…)
2009
I have been planning for a while to create some tutorials and so I was playing around with photoshop CS4 and came up with the following method to creating a blood splatter effect.
Blood Splatter Tutorial
Time: 20 mins
Skill Level: beginners to advanced
Equipment Required: Mac/PC, Photoshop (CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4), Wacom Graphics Tablet (optional)
Step 1
Create a new document in Photoshop – I created a 500 x 500 pixel document.
Step 2
Next, create a new layer and fill the layer with black.
Step 3
Go to the brush selector and choose the ‘soft round 65′ brush (hover the cursor over the brush picture to see the name).
Open the brush panel (F5 key or go to Windows > Brushes) and select the ‘shape dynamics’. Set ‘size jitter’ and ‘angle jitter’ to 100%. Select ‘scattering’ and set ‘scatter’ to 100% and select the ‘both axes’ option. Select ‘other dynamics’ and set the ‘opacity jitter’ to 100%. Finally select the ‘wet edges’ and ‘smoothing’ options.
Step 4
With our customized (customised for us Brits!) brush selected, choose a dark red/maroon colour and brush over the page and you should get the following effect:
 
 
Step 5
Repeat step 4 with a variety of light and darker colours which should leave you with an image like the following:
 
Step 6
Select the magic wand tool from the toolbar and set the tolerance to 60. Select the black area and delete it. Your image should now look similar to the one below:
 
 
Step 7
We now have the basis for our blood splatter but it needs a bit of adjusting to look more realistic. Go to the layer style panel by double clicking on the layer we have been working with. select bevel and emboss  and check both the contour and texture options. Under the texture option, select the cloud texture and set scale  to 81% and depth to +79%. Under the main bevel and emboss settings, use the following settings:
 
Double-click the contour icon and use the following settings:
Use the above input and output percentages for the first point and for the second point use the following percentages:
 
Step 8
The final effect should be the same as below. By adjusting the scatter settings of the brush, it can also be used for freehand drawing.
 
 
I hope this tutorial is useful and am happy to answer any questions people may have. More tutorials will be coming soon!
2009
Recently at work I have had a large amount of small amendment and update jobs which can be a little tedious.
However, I have now been given a flash-based project which looks pretty cool and from what I have understood it is going to push me out of my “comfort zone”.
For the project I will have to build a flash video player to stream .flv files from a server and also an clickable movieclip to link the view to another site/page.
All the elements in the flash project will be customizable including the .flv file (so different clips can be played) as will the positioning of the .flv and the positioning, colour and style of the moviclip button.
I really like the idea of creating re-usable work as eventually you end up with a library you can use to make your more productive in the future.
I will however have to brush up on Flash CS4 (which has changed alot since CS3) and also my AS3.
For anyone learning Adobe Flash, Lynda.com is a great tutorial site covering every aspect of coding, development, 2d and 3d design and lots more. Also the people over at FlashKit are great for help with AS3 and offer a whole bunch of tutorials, resources and help via their forum board.
2008
I recently got the chance to work on a Flash project and test Flash CS4. From the moment of opening the application it was clear adobe had been very busy updating Flash for the CS4 version.
The default layout is somewhat confusing and seems like they have changed it just because they could – but onced swapped back to the old default (tools on the left, timeline on the top, properties and actions at the bottom) things became a bit more familiar.
The new motion editor offers alot more than the classic tween from earlier versions but at the same time can be quite complex. The classic tween method can still be used which is something I imagine alot of people will use.
Along with the motion editor comes 3D motion, allowing you to twist, flip and rotate shapes as if they were 3D.
Another useful feature is Adobe’s Media Encoder which comes bundled with many of the Adobe packages. It allows you to convert various video formats into flv files so they can be used in flash.
As a whole, Flash CS4 feels alot more robust than previous versions and is definitely worth upgrading.
2008
After just a month of getting nowhere with some pretty bad customer service at Adobe, Design Premium CS4 has finally arrived!
Photoshop CS4 extended , Illustrator CS4 and my Wacom are the most important things for me to be able to do my job and I was hoping there would be some great upgrades from CS3.
I have only had a few days using the products but it is already clear to see what is good and what is bad.
Illustrator CS4 has a cool alignment tool which flashes up guides helping you line up to other objects on the page. It also highlights individual elements as you roll over them making it easy to see where everything is – this has been really useful for more accurate vector work.
Photoshop CS4 extended on the other hand has had some rather questionable upgrades.
In Photoshop CS4 extended,  the addition of OpenGL gives, according to adobe, the following benefits:
- Smooth Display at ALL Zoom Levels
- Animated Zoom Tool
- Animated Transitions when doing a One Stop Zoom
- Hand Toss Image
- Birdseye View
- Rotate Canvas
- Smooth Display of Non Square Pixel Images
- Pixel Grid
- Move Color Matching to the GPU
- Draw Brush Tip Editing Feedback via GPU
- 3D GPU features include:
- 3D Acceleration
- 3D Axis
- 3D Lights Widget
- Accelerated 3D Interaction via Direct To Screen
Now this sounds great and I thought I am running both a high end Macbook pro (2.5ghz dual core, 4GB FB 1066mhz RAM and Nvidia 9600M GT 512mb Graphics) and Mac pro workstation (2x 2.8ghz quad-core xeons, 6GB FB RAM, ATI Radeon HD Graphics) this should be great and then I realise… they don’t support OpenGL!
Now, considering that Apple machines are supposedly the best for design and Adobe’s Creative Suite are also in the top running in their field, do you not think they would get together to discuss things such as support of a major feature within the most successful and popular image editing and graphic design software applications.
It’s not the end of the world, but it has been a major nuisance as it took forever to work out why the cursor was displaying about 15 pixels above where the actual cursor position was – so every time I clicked, it would select something 15 pixels below what I wanted!
Design Premium CS4 has some nice features and Illustrator CS4 has been vastly improved. I am hoping that OpenGL support will eventually become available so I can use Phtoshop CS4 to its full potential.