Lesson 6 — The Wonder of it All!

GeorgeIsAmazing

No, the item to the right is not a "pure" gradient blend mode product. I noticed, as I was playing with this, that it appeared that the resulting patterns might tile nicely. As a matter of fact they do. What you see is a result of such tiling.

At left is the piece which was made into a pattern and used to fill the big guy.

It began life as a Blue, Yellow, Blue gradient, applied horizonal on Layer 1, then vertical on Layer 2, and finally as a diagonal (center to upper right) on Layer 3. All gradients were Reflected mode. After much playing around with blending modes (which involved making an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the combinations I like), I decided on Saturation between the bottom and middle layers, and Darken between the top and middle layers.

The piece at left shows an unexpected artifact. The basic gradient for all is Ultra Violet. For the lowest layer, it was applied center to upper left; for the middle layer, it was applied center to upper right; for the top, it was applied center to top middle. In each case, it was Reflected mode.

The Blending modes are: between bottom and middle, Linear Burn; between middle and top, Pin Light. Nothing exciting yet.

Taking Janee's advice and trying an adjustment layer in between, I played with this for a while, applying a number of different types — without being impressed with the results. But, when I applied a Gradient adjustment layer between middle and top and chose the DeepSea gradient with a Noise level of 40%, bingo! The Rorshach-type artifact in the light magenta came out. That's a keeper.

This will no doubt see future life as a Title Slide in a presentation. Hoefler Text 60 point, with an Outer Bevel, Chisel Hard, layer effect provides a good effect. It's less grainy in the original.

I'm undecided as yet whether selecting the color from the darker patches of the artifact was a good idea. However, the Photoshop document is saved with the layers, so I can change that if I decide to go back to Basic Black.

Janee is right; this can take over your life if you're not careful.

I had planned on trying a lot of different things with this, but when I saw this I stopped immediately.

This is very simple. The bottom layer is the Green gradient, noise at 50%, applied center to bottom middle, reflect mode. The top layer is the Red Green gradient, applied center to upper left.

The blend mode is Color Dodge.

This graphic will see use probably the first weekend of summer. I design the graphics used in my church's services for the hymns. Most of our parishioners are quite elderly and many complained that holding the hymnals was becoming difficult, so we project the words on a large screen in the front of the sanctuary. The ray of light descending from the upper left has obvious theological implications.

GeorgeIteration

I begin with a blue box, outline in yellow. I set a transformation that would rotate the box 30° (requiring 20 iterations to go all around the circle); the center of the rotation was originally the middle of the bottom of the box. Additionally, each transformation reduced the size of the box to 95% in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.When I had done it 20 times, there was a "hole" in the middle, so I continued to iterate until the hole was gone; this took 120 iterations, and the figure looked like the item on the left.

I turned off the visibility of the background, and with the other 120 layers, did a Merge Visible so that I had exactly one figure to deal with. I duplicated the resulting layer and moved it up 200 pixels. Duplicated the original again, and moved it right 200 pixels. Duplicated the original a third time, and moved it down 200 pixels. Finally, I moved the original left 200 pixels. Once again, I turned off the background visibility and Merge Visible, producing one figure with four "stars" on a single layer. I duplicated that layer and rotated it 45°, with the center as the point of rotation. Again, the background was turned off and the blend mode for the top layer was changed to Color Dodge. This produced the light blue areas where the two layers intersected. Keep the background turned off.

Merge visible one more time. Duplicate the layer. Transform reducing the size to 75% in both dimensions and rotating 60°. Change blending mode to Color Burn. Duplicate smaller layer. Transform reducing the size to 50% and rotating 60°. Change blending mode to Color Dodge. Duplicate smallest image, reduce size to 50% and rotate 60°; change blending mode to Color Burn.

Then I went to the background layer and made a new layer. In that layer I created a radial gradient, using the lightest blue as the beginning and the darkest as the end. When I applied the gradient, it wasn't what I wanted, so undid, clicked Reverse and applied it again. Now it was right.

2005 to George:

Instead of Merge Visible, link and create a Layer Set.

I've done several more; they can be found on my Iterative Transformations page.

The result is shown at left.

I turned off the visibility of the gradient and the background. Merged the visible layers, turned on the visibility of the gradient, and changed the blend mode of the figure to Color Burn. Close. I wanted more contrast. I tried applying a Contrast adjustment layer between the gradient and the figure, but that didn't work at all like I expected or wanted. I duplicated the figure layer. Since the figure layer was already in Color Burn mode, so was the new layer. Now it was right. Almost. Selecting each of the figure layers, I applied an outer glow of size 10 and spread of 15, accepting the defaults for everything else. Now it's right. Crop and Save for Web.

The figure below is 14 kb larger than Janee's request, but at lower fidelity, you couldn't see the filigree lines inside the figure. I plead for mercy.

GeorgeSnow

This took a lot more work than it should have. The main problem was getting the cut-outs to actually cut out. I was completely at sea when it came to the Combine path operation. I believe I've got it now and, as a result, this piece is a lot more intricate than it needed to (or should) be.

But, now I've got a method worked out for removing pieces from a path, for making sure that pasted, rotated, and moved slices line up precisely, and I'm still not happy. When the original work was reduced to make it within the desired file size (how many times can one plea for indulgence?), the detail of the fill pattern was lost, the cloverleafs were lost (you didn't even know they were there, did you? Be honest.) and the green background banded up something terrible.

To give you an idea how large this beast was in the original size, when I asked Save for Web to optimize to a desired file size of 50K, it produced something that was 190K! I understand the necessity for web work to download quickly, and I've now learned that, if I'm doing web work, I need to take that into consideration in the beginning. Before I've put in an hour's worth of intricate detail work which is going to get lost anyway.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Doing it was actually quite fun, it was just the publication phase that was annoying.

GeorgeFingerPaint