The parrot on the rock.

As we've been told about how to create reflections I thought I'd go for something a little more challenging, getting a parrot to reflect on the water.

I started off with the two images (just found off google images) and placed the parrot image onto the water image, removing all the background I could. I then added some shadows onto the rock where I placed the parrot and some shadows on the parrot itself, so it would fit in.

Next, I created a copy of the parrot, added it to another layer and flipped it vertically. Obviously the colours wouldn't look right at this point, so I added a multiply layer blend to it, which gave it the depth I was looking for. After this I used the smudge tool to blue the reflection to fit in with the water.


All I did now was touch up some shadows and sort out the artifacts on the sides of the reflection by simply erasing it.

I'm quite glad with how the image came out, it's a good simple effect. What's wrong with the idea though, is that it doesn't look very "real" the pose of the parrot and the setting it's in don't exactly fit well together. Other than that though, it's been a good experiment.

(This image is saved as 1_parrotreflection.psd in the "Photoshop" directory, the progress images will also be found on the CD.)

When chickens attack.

Just thought I'd play around with some stuff, do a quick photoshop play-around and see if I can generate some ideas, obviously a fire breathing chicken isn't the greatest of things to do, but it gave me a feel of what I could do.

Wasn't anything complicated involved in producing this either, which I think is good, I just cut out the picture of the chicken with the lasso tool and placed it on top of the picture of the 'city', same went for the fire. (Which I took from this photo)

The smoke from the fire was just a few squiggles of the brush tool and I filled in some shadows with the burn tool. Oh yes, and I added in some color reflection for the fire on the chicken, ground, etc.

Reading is fun! Yay!

Just been reading through a book I took out of the library called The Art and Science of Digital Compositing by Ron Brinkmann, and it's a really good read! Alot of it consists of video compositing, like taking layers of video and image and creating an end result, but the information it talks about is just great.

I'll just quote a part:

"A histogram is a way of displaying a plot of the number of pixels for each given brightness value in an image. Consider the four-bit, single channel image shown in Figure 9.1b. With only four bits to represent the color in the image, each pixel can have one of 16 possible values."

I'll definately be using the stuff in here as reference for the stuff I do later on.