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dawn

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Posts posted by dawn

  1. Nothing special. I drew an asterisk (with the cross spokes on different layers) and then played with various blurs and color balance/hue-sat till I got something I liked.

    I think I also did some gradient fade outs. (Basically fading from the center out to black.) Just play around with pdn, and I'm sure you'll be able to come up with something similar fairly easily. :)

  2. I dled this plug-in a while back but have been avoiding using it since the interface intimidated me. (Yes, even with the English translation. All the tabs and buttons and angles freaked me out. :P)

    Anyway, today I decided to try it out and I'm amazed by the results.

    Shape 3D took this 5-second squiggle:

    squiggle.png

    and turned it into this:

    squiggleball.png.

    (Okay, I added a little cast shadow. But still!)

    I know I'm a little late in saying so, but thanks MKT!

  3. Here's an avatar I made for another forum a while back:

    iceghost.gif

    I wanted a sort of ghost-like feel to it. I found that dragging a transparent cloud layer across my base worked quite nicely. Unfortunately, the .gif itself turned out about 200kb too big, but I still keep it around just to look at. :)

  4. Hint for those of us (like me, heh) who hate fussing around with layers to make them line up just so:

    Before you do ANYTHING, record the pixel widths of both your front and side images.

    Open up your front image and adjust the canvas size like BuzzKill tells you to (remember to anchor center right, secondary color transparent, uncheck "maintain aspect ratio") but instead of just doubling the width, add the number of pixels in the side image's width to the number of pixels in the front image's width and input that.

    For example, say your front image is 500x1000 and your side image is 250x1000. Instead of just doubling the width on the first canvas resize to 1000x1000, make it 750x1000 instead. (500 + 250 = 750)

    Now paste into a new layer your side image. You should find that it is perfectly aligned with your front image, no fussing necessary!

    Ctrl+Shift+R (resize canvas size again) this time doubling your original canvas size. (eg., If your original front image was 500x1000, now make it 1000x1000.)

    Follow BuzzKill's tutorial from where s/he says "Time to give it perspective" (using the rotate/zoom function).

    dawnbox.png

  5. Click on Gradient :GradientTool: , then change the mode to transparency... :AlphaChannel:

    Huh, I never noticed that drop-down menu before. Yeah, that works too. :)

    I usually do gradients by playing with the color palette. I click "More>>" and set either my primary or secondary color to transparency 0 and the other to white, black, or whatever I want the image to fade out to. Then I apply my gradient, usually in a new, top layer.

    The advantage of this is that you can also set the transparency to something that isn't 0. (e.g., If you wanted to do a subtle color wash, you could choose your transparency color and then set it to 50 or something, and then do your gradient.) As far as I know, you can't do that with the drop-down menu, that's for pure transparency fades only.

  6. cjmcguinness, that's very close to what I was looking for, thanks!

    The main thing I wanted was a "glossy" effect that wouldn't overly distort the layers beneath. That way I could hopefully put any kind of picture as a background layer and still get that glossy/3D look on top.

    I wasn't even sure in my head what that would look like, but your pics have given me some idea, thank you. :)

  7. The author of this tutorial suggested playing around with round gradients, so I made...

    firesphere-1.png

    ... a fire-sphere. Because, well, I like spheres. :D

    Looking at it now, I think I should have made the highlights more transparent, but I stupidly didn't save the .pdn before I merged the layers, so, oh well. I still think it looks nifty. Great tutorial!

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