For those just beginning their journey into the compositing art world, the task of blending your cutouts into the scene is one of the first and most important challenges. Nothing screams “amateur” like a cutout with hard unblended edges. After failure to color balance to match the scene, not blending…
Yesterday we built a background image with the mixer brush from an single image. Here’ are a few additional ones I built with just a few hours playing with the mixer brushes. Some are very vivid and bright and I probably wouldn’t use them directly, but, they have loads of…
Today, another video on how to turn an image into a beautiful textured background that you can use in your compositing. This demonstration will use the mixer brush. The video is about 5 minutes long.
As promised, a quick video on how to build that magic mixer layer that will allow you to paint with the mixer brush without turning on “sample all layers.” This allows you to work quickly without brush lag and for those with older and slow machines, this will greatly improve…
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.…
Today, a composite instead of a painting. I posted this on Instagram yesterday, but I didn’t like the ground under the squirrels so I put a dirt overlay pattern on it in softlight and transformed the perspective. I like it much better than the one yesterday. I also fixed the…
This composite is painted in Photoshop with a couple of different mixer brushes. The background was painted with a very loose under painting brush and the elephants were painted with a much more dry textured brush. The grass was added with a brush I built from a hair brush where…
I’m constantly looking for new and better techniques for using the mixer brush for painting fur. The mixer brush, even when used with VERY dry settings, will smudge out most of the details in the fine tips of your hair. While I have designed “edge puller” brushes to pull those…
My painting today is a composite and painting. The cactus image was captured last year at the botanical gardens. It was shoot with a very narrow depth of field so only the orange flower was in focus. The warbler is also from the gardens at the bird blind but on…