Today – a special… a video. I built this video to demonstrate a technique for using a Frequency Separation in photoshop for painting animal hides such as elephants. This could be used for any animals without fur or feathers that have rough textured hides. In addition, I demonstrate a couple…
Trying a new painting technique after watching Richard Sturdevant’s Wildlife Painting class. I built my own brush through, as nothing in his library or mine was going to give me the results I needed… but.. that’s ok… I’ve built hundreds of custom brushes… now I have a great feather brush.…
Someone asked me a question on Facebook about my technique for blending my cutouts into the background, so I thought I would write a little article about it. I actually use two different technique, one during my compositing and one final step to blend all the elements seamlessly into the…
I was getting ready to paint one of the leopard images that I captured on my safari to South Africa. The leopard was sitting up in the tree in the the original image, but I didn’t want the details of the original background to be a distraction to the painting,…
A few days ago I was out browsing on my Deviantart account and I ran across this link from Sirius-sdz and his collection of textures. As a digital painter and producer of fine art works, I generally build my own backgrounds, but I’m always looking for great inspiration or materials…
UPDATE **ADOBE HAS RETIRED THIS TOOL** You now have to use the web based color wheel. Do you ever look at a painting or piece of art and think, “wow, those colors really seem to fit!” and wonder why? Most of us are familiar with complimentary colors and have…
Painting with the mixer brush, or any digital painting, has one disadvantage if you are going for a photo-realistic effect; the painting smudges and softens the pixels. The entire process is counter intuitive to keeping things sharp. I think this is one of the reason why many of the current…
This article is the third technique in the series of turning day-to-night. In this technique, we are going to touch on a few more complicated concepts of using smart filters, loading a luminosity mask from the channel panels and making adjustment to a curve adjustment mask in addition to a…
The second technique we will cover in the series on turning day to night will use the color lookup tables or LUTs that also come with Photoshop. LUTs are used in the video industry but are starting to gain popularity with photography editing as well. With recent changes to Lightroom…
The second series in my compositing tutorials was planned to be lighting techniques. But as I started documenting the various topics, I realized that the first thing we need to do is make sure the everyone knows a process for converting their images from day to night. Most compositors that make…