FREEHAND DRAWING IN THE DIGITAL REALM
| |
|
1. Tools for starting to use Painter | |
|
Tools for starting to use Painter. First, work monochromatically, looking at develop a wide range of textures and a sensitive use of the grey tones. Explore the brushes palette, specifically focusing on the dry media tools at first. The Controls Panel. The Controls panel has three sliders: Size, Opacity, and Grain. Size: changes the size of the brush you are using. Opacity: changes the Opacity with which your selected color is applied by the brush you are using. Grain: indicates the extent to which the brush you are using is covering the grain. At 100% the grain is completely obliterated, and at 25%, it is only covering 25% of the grain. The Paper type can be changed in the Art Materials Palette. All palettes, if not visible, are accessible in the Window>Show Palette pull down menu. Experiment with different paper types and grain interactions. Most of the tools have Opacity, Grain and Size settings that mimic the most common natural media counterpart. You can change all of these tools to meet your own specifications by altering the values in t he Controls panel, as well as the Method and Sub Category in the Brushes Palette. Explore all the brushes you are interested in, and make sure to explore the Method and Subcategory pulldown menus in the second tier of the Brushes Palette pulldown menu. If you can't see the pulldown parts of this palette, click on the small window icon in the window bar of the palette until they appear. Method: This indicates the Method of the brush: what it is doing. The two most useful at this early stage are Buildup and Cover. Buildup indicates that the strokes you lay down are affected by the strokes underneath them, creating a built-up series of strokes. Cover indicates that the strokes you make are not affected by what is underneath; they will cover what ever is below. By changing this simple feature, you can really change the way a brush interacts in your drawing. This change is particularly interesting when working with color. Subcategory: This is the way the strokes are made up: the real differences to explore are "soft" and "hard" as well as "grainy" and "smooth" . Experiment with these differences. When you develop a brush you like, you can save it as a Variant by going to the Variant pulldown menu in the Brushes palette and selecting Save Variant. It will prompt you to give it a name: be specific, and change the name from the original. It will then appear in the Brush palette as a Variant. You can also drag the icons of the brushes you create onto the desktop to create a custom palette of your own brushes. You can save your Custom Palette by going to Window>Custom Palette>Organizer. This will allow you to name your palettes and export them for use on other machines...this way you can save your palettes to a zip and carry them with you.
1. Open an RGB TIF image in Painter. 2. Check Image size and Pixel Dimensions to make sure that the specs of the image match your end needs. 3. Under the File menu, choose Clone. A duplicate of your image will appear with the words 'Clone of' in front of the original document\rquote s name. The clone contains a pixel-to-pixel correspondence with its source document. 4. In the Clone, go to the Select menu and choose, Select All (ctrl-A) Then hit the backspace key to delete the image. 5. Go to the Canvas menu and choose Tracing Paper. You will see a 50% ghost of your image, You can toggle back and forth between seeing the trace and not seeing it by using (cmd-T). 6. Now you can draw with the set of drawing tools available to you, as well as use the Cloner tools (the Cloner icon looks like two planes floating parallel to each other with a little red arrow between them). Experiment with these, as well as with the variations provided by the Controls box, as well as the variations provided by changing the Subcategory of the cloner in the Brushes palette. Things to look out for: Always turn off the Tracing Paper feature before printing: your image will not print as it appears in tracing paper mode, or be saved that way. If you close your image and wish to work on it again, open the Clone and then go to File>Clone Source. This allows you to open up your previous image or any other image, as long as it has the exact same size specifications as the Clone. Saving a Color Palette:It is very useful to develop a simple color palette to work from in your drawing. A few color mixed in a wide range of ways will give you a more coherent image than lots of colors mixed in to one image. To save a color palette: In the art materials palette, go to the Color pulldown menu and select "Adjust color set". A new palette will appear. In this palette, click on the button that says "new set". It will ask you if you want to save changes to the currently open brushes (probably Painter.brs) and say yes. DO NOT delete or replace that palette. Painter cannot run without it. You will see an Untitled palette appear in the white windo w at the top of the palette. This means you have a new set. Hold down the command key and your cursor will turn into an eyedropper. When you click in a certain color, the color will appear as the foreground color in the controls palette. In the Color Set window that is still open, unlock the small lock icon and click on "add color". Your color should appear in the new palette on your desktop. Continue to build the palette from colors in the image and then click on the Library button. You will be asked if you want to save the Color set, click yes, and at the prompt save it in your home directory or on your zip with the name of the artist or painting you are working with. If you can1t seem to select the exact color you want, you may need to create it yourself. Start with a neighboring color and adjust, carefully, the Hue, Saturation, and lightness of the color until you get a close approximation. You can watch the color change in the primary color box on the screen. Pay close attention to what you change: you may find it useful to write down particular HSL values that you like. To close the color set, simply close its window. To load another color set or to open this one when you launch painter, select 3Load Color SetSı2 from the same pull down menu (Art Materials Palette>Color.) To add colors to the set, select Adjust Color set and UNLOCK your color set by clicking on the lock icon. You should save this palette to your own folder or Zip when Painter prompts you to save the changes to the set. It will prompt you when it shuts down. resolution Start with more resolution than you think you will need, and always sample your image down, not up. Your constant goal is is lose as little image information as possible, so scan at high resolutions, and if you are unsure about how much image resolution you need, ask the printer or manager who is handling the project. To calculate the resolution necessary for a specific printer or output device, find out the linescreen of the device and use a resolution that is 1.5x the line screen. p(ex.> 600 dpi laser Printer with a line screen of 85 lpi needs 85 x1.5=127.5 ppi) Remember that all screen based work should be at 72 dpi, which is screen resolution. Resolution for print is almost always higher than this.scanning & adjustments Always scan your images at 100%, and always check any changes you make to your images at 1:1 or 100% view in Photoshop. Do not crop excessively or attempt to make color correction or sharpening decisions with your scanner. Save that work for Photoshop where the tools are more sensitive and you can practice your observational and correction skills. save your work. Save often, and back up your work at the end of each work session onto a second hard drive or removable media (like a floppy or ZIP disk). Every time you open a file to work on it, save it under a new name. Also, always save your raw scan without changes so that you can go back and work with it if you find you have a different end use. Use very clear naming conventions so that your files are recognizable to you.memory Make sure that you always work with both sufficient RAM and sufficient scratch disk space. A good rule of thumb is to allocate at least three times your largest file size in RAM available to you, plus 7 or 8 MB for the program itself, remembering that each layer added to an image increases the file size. Scratch disk space available has to be equal to or greater than the RAM you1ve allocated. Memory allocation and sufficient disk space is crucial to effective, (mostly) crash-free Photoshop use. working in grayscale make sure your grayscale image has a full range of lights and darks in it, and use the info palette (Window>Show Info) to look at the amount of black in different areas of the image. Learn to use the Levels instead of the Brightness and Contrast commands to adjust your images. The Brightness/Contrast commands affect all the pixels the same way (like changing all of them by a value of ten, for example) whereas the Levels is a more subtle way to control the Shadow, Highlight and midtone values. To learn to use the levels, experiment. Remember that the sliders represent the shadow, highlight, and midtone points, and sometimes all you need to do is slightly shift the midtone point up or down a bit to improve an image. (The midpoint is set at 1.00. Try going in small increments 1.1, 1.25, and look at the changes.) Dragging the shadow and highlight sliders into the histogram deletes information, so do this with caution. using the white and black points to create Line Art from a grayscale scan. Go to Image>Adjust>Levels. using the small white eyedropper on the far right of the palette, click in the area of the image that you want to see as white. This will push all the pixel values in the entire image LIGHTER than this value to white. You should see your image change a lot. To push areas to black, select the black-filled eyedropper and click in the area of your image you wish to see go to 100% black. This will change all the pixel values equal to and darker than this pixel to black. You can fine tune this image by using the rubber stamp tool and the brush tools filled with black and white to catch stray points and gray areas. Layers Working with layers takes some time to get used to, but it is ultimately very intuitive. Some things to remember: To work on a layer, it must be active in the layers palette. Keep the layers palette window open and visible so that you can check this often. A new layer will be created for type each time to you use the type tool or copy and paste a selection. Keep track of your layers by naming them (double click on the layer to get the Layer options). To move layers, simply click and drag them up or down in the palette when the little fist appears. Their order affects the way they display. To further adjust layers, use the pop-up menu that appear when you select the triangle on the upper right of the layers palette. Here you can duplicate, delete, and modify layer interaction. basic color correction Color correction cannot be briefly covered and is best learned in class or with the Photoshop manual, but here are some basic rules to follow when working with color. Keep your image in one color mode, preferably the mode it starts out in, until you finish any image manipulation you are doing. Switching modes deletes a lot of image information. The Variations palette is a simple, albeit coarse way to learn about the colors in your image. Keep the adjustment settings set at the fine end of the adjustment scale, and adjust the image in small increments. You can also use the Levels, and with a good guide, start to work with the Curves.
Use the rubber stamp tool Select the rubber stamp tool from the tools palette and make sure that the options palette is visible for the tool (you can do this by double clicking on the tool itself.) Select the type of cloning you want and also check the brush size before starting to rubber stamp. Position the rubber stamp tool over the area you wish to clone, hold down the option key to open1 the rubber stamp tool, and click to fill the stamp. Then move the tool to the area where you wish to deposit the clone (this can be on a different layer!) and start painting. rubberstamping type! You can fill type with a pattern or photograph by using the rubberstamp tool. Select the area you want to clone from, using the clone aligned option in the Options palette. Select the layer with the type on it, making sure the preserve transparency1 box is selected. Paint with the rubberstamp tool over the letterforms and watch your image appear in the type. a drop shadow technique Use the Layers>Effects palette in Photoshop 5.5 to create drop shadows, glows, bevels and emboss effects. sharpening There are two points at which to sharpen. If you must, sharpen slightly at the beginning of your process to restore your scan to the appearance of the original image, and then to sharpen at the end to match your end use. The most sensitive tool for sharpening is the Unsharp mask. Experiment with different ranges of sharpening: this selectively sharpens the pixels based on the ranges you set. The amount is the intensity of the sharpening halo: start with around 200% and work up or down from there. The Radius the the width of the sharpening halo that gets set. The wider the halo, the more obvious the sharpening. Start low and increase, checking as you go. The Threshold allows you to choose the tonal range of pixels affected. Zero (0) affects all the pixels: a threshold of 3 affects adjacent pixels with a value higher than three values apart (122 and 125, for example). |