delpart

Lost my reply thanks to connection drop. Argh ... Recap: Multicolor stars can and will change perspective of the entire image. It's an odd thing, but that isn't helping with the perspective you're working on. Super bright sources you could stare into would be filtered. Otherwise all you'd see is faint outlines of the planets and a mainly white screen taken directly on like that. Since it would be filtered, you'd have a ton of wash and nearly no visible stars because of it. The shadowing is not helping and the sun would cause a coronal effect blending through the edge of the atmosphere ... All the things you're expecting to see from thousands of previous real and imagined images are not helping in getting where you're headed probably. I know I always have to argue when its a picture of our Blue Marble ... I'd try making the sun smaller with a distinct coronal boundary and extend its glow slightly irregular. Then set deeper shadows on the planet and consider eclipsing the moon or at least watching the angles. Stars with so many forward light sources should probably be smaller etc. This will also probably help with getting the sun brighter. Higher contrast in the source background or more black should push that up some. Maybe later I can try and create an example mockup. Hope that helps. Just anger typed that ...

I like the base logo concept. Not sure on the lower stroke of the F being the same length as the top or not, but I think its just the wish to try and match parallel lines my eyes are doing on it. The idea of putting a border on the idea of "Free" is harder to work with. Depends on what your goal is though in the overall future use of the logo of course. I'd try and keep it as simple a stylized image as possible to avoid forcing away from the branding of the T and F combination. Obviously, this is all prelim work, so I may be guessing at what you're looking for in the long run. All remain clean and recognizable so that should translate well for most needs.

Well in cursory testing it can provide some alternatives as well for a color tint wash like YM indicated. Done mainly on primitives and the negation aspect is different than White Balance or most auto leveling passes. Definitely GIGO as well based on user selection as well as image density. Thanks for sharing up your efforts on this.

Well, now that is much faster. And I definitely found a use for that version of hue/sat. And for this dinosaur who cant use the GPU blurs I have at least one for when I decide to push my luck with a large image. Now if only someone can make splinter blur faster I think I'd be set for a while. (Not hinting, just thinking out loud as its painfully slow for me.)

@jaxon: TY. Wish I'd been more creative, but I wanted to see how it worked and couldn't really imagine making something as nifty as yours or YM's ... Crisp in this case is just from the AA in S3D I think ... Though I did blend it a little differently with an alpha mask of the ball, so I may have gotten a little AA bump from filling in a few gaps there too ... Background is an experimental 6 step creation. Appreciate the nod on it. I've stared at them so much, I cant tell what I should be looking at/for anymore ... I like what you did with a blend of a couple of ideas there. @NN: Nice results. I'm so glad I didn't make a 2012 one now. We'd have been twins more or less. One note about the shifting using the keyboard, that you may or may not have figured out already, is to move one arrow over, then one arrow down to move the pixel in the 45 degree from the corner if you're using the standard lighting angle. The stair step of moving pixels like that always seems strange to me, but I always have to tell myself, "Count them. This isn't a video game ... and you cannot strafe the image ... " Again, somewhere in my head I thought I mentioned the idea in text, but I guess I didn't ... Always seems like moving two pixels when its really only one. Maybe that's just me finding it odd or having to recall to count the steps ...

Argh I must have mangled my install then because mine is in Object ... Which makes sense to me for all that. I can only apply it to something I would consider to be an object and not an entire image or layer pass like the stylize plugins do ... **EDIT: With the noted exception of blending a drop shadow on a layer with some transparency involved of course. Meh, I guess I get to figure out why its in the wrong place, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to "fix" it or not ... Seems like most got a solid nod from the article/ad spot ... I'd almost call it an ad with how they opted to write it up, but then I'm not familiar with the publication enough. Sort of reminds me of the Family Handyman format in some ways ... Thanks for post GF. I'm sure they wont mind the potential reverse sales leads of it all.

Yes, but that in this point actually matches the theme of most of the production from Mr. S ... @K : Nice docking platform/station/graphic for those icons btw. Forgot to come back and mention that was a nice clean design on that aspect of those.

And for the ones that dont have shortcuts, there are many options/applications for creating custom macros around that will fill in the blanks. Unless it's something as complicated and as well developed as MS Office, you're not often going to find a one to one shortcut array built into most applications.

Ultimate works fine with PDN of course ... The inline upgrade process with these operating systems often mucks up the service packs and other updates. Up to and including blowing out parts of .NET ... Rarely recommended to do such "upgrades" versus clean installs because of potential issues. If that was the case, make sure to run through the .NET updates and repairs and see what Windows Update may or may not show you. Not enough data but it sounds like you're missing service packs etc. Also, what's the exact error it gives you? This may have been covered already, but without that it's a guessing game not having seen PDN fail in this manner.

Ooops. Apologies all around. Looks like I was off the mark there in regards to this being considered potentially eclipsed (barring the exception of the hue/sat in some ways). New link works. Much appreciated.

@NN: What Jim shows is the easier way to go about it rather than doing a whole layer with a selection to delete. Not sure but looking at yours it almost looks like you deleted the wrong part of the selection unless you were intended to add the clouds to the starscape, it should have been on the planet part ... But without the layers to see what's happen its a guess based on what my eyes are telling. Just ran through trying to get paint-bucket to behave itself trying to match your colors/spreads to some degree to see if I could start near that ... even the the fast and dirty ones with some random fills are blurring out a little flatter, but its that haze/glow layer that does it to the that sort of pattern. You're essentially blending an semi-opaque texture in with the planet "surface" when doing it this way. And not matter what I keep thinking, from space, or this sort of distance perspective, you rarely can see shadow under them etc. Plus it adds that ethereal feel ... Oh and at first of course I didn't reset my S3D from playing with a few other things and that definitely left things looking more distinct than I liked. What seems to throw most on these from looking them over is either getting the base texture correct or the glow/halo/shadowing of the planetoids ... Refinement comes from there it seems.

When Shape3D doesn't blur out some things in the wrap/warp as it normally seems to, you have to consider doing it before you run that on the texture. A slight amount of medium and a pinch of blur (direction or Gaussian) looks like it would blend that texture approach better. I'll make one and see what happens I guess as right now I'm going from text to mental image and comparing with the screen shots ...

Ooops. I thought you knew about it or I would have screenshot that for you some time ago ... (Note to self, dont assume ...)

Righto, sorry for the odd background in my test ... was messing around with a fast effect for making cloud layers (which seems to work from the looks of it). Seemed to fit in well though so I left it instead of the layer I meant to copy ... Jokingly I made a "PowerBall" ... I avoided the red of the like named lottery in the US to not extended that pun too far. Set up other masking layer to get the shadow to not be so flat on the sphere using alpha mask and blending from the top down to try and match the gradient in the ball's shadow. Also set the shadow layer to glow to offset the highlight ridge from the background coloring. In hindsight I probably should have not removed the specular highlight or done a little more in adjusting my lighting to keep the 3D aspect more alive. I've stared at it too long so maybe its more 3D to someone else. Obviously this isn't "text" but it could be considered a dingbat by some depending on what fonts you like to mess with. Its just the power state/power button/standby symbol found on a lot of things these days. Reference image acquired from the kind folks at Wikipedia: IEC 5009 Image Library at Wiki Commons

Okay, agree to disagree a little. Though the logic battle was a fun read, so dont feel it was all for not. Ya'll brought some joy from that interesting word play. (Not meaning that I enjoyed the potential angst, just the logic thing ...)

Yup, if it only works in VGA mode, its not just PDN that you need to be looking at after a "clean" install. Somewhere in the mix you more than likely have some other system configuration issues that are showing their ugly colors. PDN is just the canary pointing it out. It could be from hardware mix level up to and including something including the drivers and helper applications that were installed to make your system work. Sadly not every combination of hardware software is a good one. Primarily VGA mode disables your graphics card. But the other parts of the shell it "dumbs down" can be indicative of further interaction issues beyond the graphics drivers themselves. Especially if your graphics card is an integrated chipset on the motherboard or similar. Without crash logs or similar errata this gets into some pretty extreme guessing to assist. But for anything at this level, its beyond the scope of this forum for the most part unless someone else has some specific experience they can share in this regard.

Nope. Its been gone for some time now.

Even in the Adobe world, most people still rely on a range of tools to accomplish various tasks. For instance, PDN is not a vector graphics program, but can be used to work with things created in one to create "new things" ... Though most of the ideas have to be shared out in one way or the other to spur development ideas for those willing to implement. Hence why this is a forum to discuss this and that. Only problem is the method of wanting to help out like with Jim is lacking thousands upon thousands of words and images to keep it from feeling like a point to point battle. Not picking on you or Jim mind you. That's just the rub with forums.

Another side note, you could almost use that line noise method to create custom constellations ... And of course, for the ultimate sci-fi planet you can create more geometric shapes for the city lighting and ensure it matches up with S3D a little depending on the scale of things. Idea being that cities wouldn't be as formed chaotically or organically as we tend to do it right now ...

(Thinking out loud) The short answer is: No. Even with some of the other programs geared to this sort of direct draw input, watercolor is a really hard thing to re-create. Even with PS, you're talking about a lot of hours to learn to use the brushes to create that effect. Especially if you're wishing to convert an image ... Using an outlining approach (manually) with varying transparency and then coming back and using combinations of dents and blurs can hammer the effect into place, but it requires about 1000 more steps than needed. At least from what I've seen, if you need that level of specific control you will have to consider pre-processing the image using something else first. Then finalizing the rest of the adjustments in PDN ... (disclaimer: an aunt of mine did watercolor for a living and she's griped about doing it digitially for about 10 years and basically gave up on the idea, so I may be a bit jaded on this one)

Well, I cant get this board to parse the extra IMG tag variables ... People are less likely to click on the smaller thumbnails depending. You'll probably want to come up with another set of resized images for this or just consider resizing the current ones and seeing how it looks. Even though a lot more people coming through here may have 1920x or higher resolution displays, the idea is to consider people with less bandwidth and screen real estate. Again, this tutorial for the most part will not suffer from working smaller. One thing if you do decide to redo the images is to not run PDN full screen and selectively position and capture only the floating tool-bars needed for a step. History in most cases can be left out, but consider layers etc. (Yes, all of this should have been in the above reply, but since I already made the error with my shaky hands to create a double post, I'm using it ...)

Cool, thanks for jumping in on it. This will hopefully keep the mods needing less antacids today for a start ... Image size: The best way is to consider cropping or hosting the images in a smaller format to start with if you wish for them to be represented here that large. The maximum size has to be 800x600 vs 1024x768. The best way to probably ensure your images are going to be the correct size to help with the illustration without requiring someone to click on 160x sized thumbnails is to redo them or use Photobucket's editor to batch resize the lot down to 800x. For this tutorial's methods, what needs to shown, etc. I dont think you really need to have thumbnails to full sized images for the most of it. Having just tested a few of them, some of the detail that may need to be seen will get lost ... Somewhere with the BBCode tags for images in posts there is a way to more or less auto-restrict the size displayed ... Not sure if it can be done here. I'll test that once I find the reference for it again in a few minutes. The problem there of course is whether or not that is considered creating a thumbnail or not by the mods. *** (Not trying to nit-pick mate. Just trying to be helpful to get your content to match the requirements list for the tutorials. I hate seeing locked tutorials here as even a duplicate could potentially morph into something great with help from the community a lot of times. Requires a lot on everyone's part, not just the author. I'm a big Stone Soup Group fan, so maybe I'm a little warped in that respect. The lights on the dark side is worth the distinction here for sure and can be blended in, colored a little, etc to give a really great effect for people pushing the idea to the far ends of the spectrum.)

You need to resize those images to fit the posting rules ... and run back through and consider the capitalization of sentences etc. While I've become accustom to the texting crowd's avoidance of these sorts of things, folks tend to think there is something missing etc when it's formated in this fashion. Regardless of what you are conveying, it can get discounted pretty quickly by not conforming some to standard sentence construction rules. You may also want to break up the space a little etc to make it less difficult to read through, but that's more cosmetic in nature ... Consider putting in why you made this tutorial or what's key to it being an addition to the many other available ones ... Getpaint.net custom Google search for Planet Tutorial Also you are missing links to the plugin(s) needed ... Only thing from a cursory overview would be to ensure to mention the AA setting in shape 3D as well to avoid that unnecessary jaggy you've got showing ... Strong potential for creating matched city glow to potential texture areas here btw. That seems to be the distinction really.

Still, considering how much more you were doing with this and color, etc this is great stuff. Like I said elsewhere, the illusion is key and you nailed it from where I was sitting ... I'm also resisting the tongue and cheek (ack another pun) comments about your comment on the next subject ... Or maybe I need to stop watching comedies before checking these things ...

And oddly enough a chap just posted an over-sized pic in the desktop thread that demonstrates doing this very thing ... I'm just linking it as I'm not sure how to set the sizing yet with this forum of a direct link: Desktop interface example