Time Immortal

Time for another Lensbaby picture.

At work a while back, we had a Guitar Hero/Rock Band party — the social committee rented an Xbox 360 and the games in question, and a bunch of folks hung out on a Friday evening after work playing fake instruments for a few hours. I’m no good at such games for the most part (I do okay on vocals), so I contented myself with taking pictures of the event.

This was one picture I was particularly pleased with when I found it on the flash card after all was said and done.

I love the exuberance on the kid’s face, the arrested action (he had just finished a drum solo, if memory serves), and (of course) the flaring that the Lensbaby causes on the left side of the frame. This is also one case where the camera’s tendency to overexpose Lensbaby shots worked in my favour, giving the background some interesting highlights (star-shaped, of course, thanks to the aperture plate I was using).

Of course, it was a high ISO shot and so required lots of noise reduction, but overall I’m really happy with this picture. Ah, to be a kid again.

Here’s a couple of things I was enlisted to make this month by use of Photoshop.

First, a prank image based on a picture of the watch one of the higher-ups at the company had posted for sale in the break room:

Process in brief: Took an image of the watch and an image of Mickey. Stretched and skewed Mickey to align him with the watch face. Removed the watch arms. Cut off Mickey’s arms, elongated them a bit, and re-attached them as one might expect watch arms to be attached. Placed Mickey on the watch, centering the point at which I joined his arms to him again over the middle of the watch face. Applied a Gaussian noise filter to Mickey to match the noise on him to the noise in the watch image. Blurred Mickey’s edges a bit for blending. Added Drop Shadow to Mickey.

Next, an image for the posters the Social Committee at work wanted put up to advertise the company’s Guitar Hero party, which is evidently taking place this Friday.

Process in brief: Cut the interface out of a stock picture of Guitar Hero. Took a picture from the last Guitar Hero party held at work, and layered it in the background of the interface. Applied a gradient fade to the “guitar slider” in the interface. Applied the Cutout filter to the background image, to (kind of) replicate the polygonal, somewhat indistinct look of the game. Blurred interface edges a bit.

Not the best Photoshopping around, by any means, but ever since I did that one image of Grace, people from around the office have been asking me to mess with images. And I’ve been getting better at doing just that.

 

Posted by Kenneth Filed in Photoshop, Work
Tags: Grace, Guitar Hero, Photoshop