Development Blog 2: Photoshop Secrets 1 - The Orb

Dove into Photoshop this week to avoid animation stuff.

I found a free tutorial from a website called Nucly which has three projects to work through in Photoshop, the first being this picture, called 'The Orb'. It was an easy enough tool to follow, and did a good job of explaining stuff, however I feel like I haven't really taken it in as I've gone.

Stuff to remember is how to create adjustment layers and highlights maps, by adding in a copy of the layer, and setting it to only effect certain colour ranges is useful information.

My masking isn't perfect, especially around the woman herself. The hair is good, but it still carried through some of the background from the previous image. That may be due to me being too picky with how I selected the mask at the pixel level.

It was also interesting that the material to create the planet was just a picture of concrete that was then distorted and warped.

The atmospheric effects were good as well. Important to note that the atmosphere effects were set to the same colour as the background, never going fully black or white, but a little blue to match the background. It's important to stay within the darkest or the lightest colour.

Fog was created using a specific brush at a very large pixel radius.

Overall film grain applied using an Overlayed solid layer of light grey, with a blur and a noise filter.