Photoshop Tutorials/General Photo Editing links and advice

[Mi-chii]

Yeah, I know;D

[Ashk]

Can anyone help me I have CS3 and I'm trying to do the sharpening thing, but for some reason there's no overlay option...?
Medagic

Overlaying is an option that you use with layers.  Sharpening is something you usually do once you've completed your image.  Unless you're talking about something totally different that's in CS3.  I can put up some pictures if you're confused, or am I confused?  He-he.

[Hidden~Secret]

anyone here have anymore Paint.NET tutorials?

[Baby_Cat]

Can you use animation with just photoshop?  Like if I wanted to make an avatar that flashes from image to image...could I use just photoshop?

[TarynKay]

I'm fairly certain you have to have a seperate program for that.

[charlotterose23]

Hey Guys

I've heard that a few people are having trouble with their pictures and getting eliminated out of contests at applications. So I thought I'd do this tutorial to show you some tips for when taking your pictures.

1. Printscreen Pictures:
For ages I used the in game camera to do all my pictures and luckily for me I have a great graphics card so they turned out okay but not great. Then one marvellous day I found the Gadwin PrintScreen and ever since then I've used it! It is simply fantastic! You can take full screen shots and then edit them and resize them later. I would reccomend anyone who doesn't have Gadwin PrintScreen or a similar program to get it!
You can get it here. Scroll down and you'll find it at the bottom of the link. It's called 'Gadwin PrintScreen'.
Tip: Once you've sucessfully downloaded and installed it, make sure you sort the settings out. You can get it to start up automatically when your computer is turned on (good for forgetful people like me!) and you can get previews of the shots you take (I don't use this but others may do).

2. Editting your pictures:
If you don't have Photoshop or any other image editting programme I strongly suggest you get GIMP! It's absolutely free! It is what I use and it is great. I won't go into much detail about editting your pictures because I've already written some tutorials (for GIMP) on how I personally edit my pictures.
Here are some links to my tutorials:
Warming Effect
How I Edit My Pictures
Multi-tone Pictures
Changing Background

Before Editting:


After Editting:


There are many other people who are even better at editting pictures and I'm sure they won't mind if you ask them for a few tips. People here at InSim are friendly. We (sometimes) don't bite.

3. Types of shots:
There are many types of pictures that hosts can ask you to do. Two of the most popular are headshot and bodyshot. I'll focus on these for now but if you need any help you can PM me or someone else

Headshot:
Generally, when a host asks for a headshot they are looking for a picture showing the top of the hair to the collarbone. Sometimes people (myself included) zoom too far out which can make it harder to see the detail of your pretty Sim's face! The trick is to fill up as much of the picture with your Sim without cutting the hair or forehead out. I would also live about a 1cm gap at the top and bottom of the picture but that is just a preference.

Here is how I would do a headshot:


...and how I wouldn't do a headshot:


Once you've practised doing a basic headshot and got that right you can try and me more adventurous!
Even though they are exactly the same Sim, in exactly the same place, using exactly the same pose, they look different. Don't be tempted to just go for a head-on headshot.
It is important that you can see the face of the Sim but you don't have to be head-on when taking the photo. Experiment with angles!

Bodyshot:
When a host asks for a bodyshot it is important that you show ALL the body. When I judge contests, I don't like seeing bodyshots of Sims with no feet! I want to see everything! Now when I do bodyshots I tend to do standing poses but lately I've seen lots of people do poses of Sims sitting down. These can look great so you can do either, as long as the host is okay with it. Once again, I would leave a 1cm gap at the top and bottom of the picture but that is just a preference.

Here is how I would do a bodyshot:


...and how I wouldn't do a bodyshot:


Just like the headshot, experiement with all the poses and don't be scared to try something a little different! Judges like to see unique ideas in pictures!

Poses:

There are absolutely thousands of poses you can get in the game. There are many hacks that you can get which help you with these (Hula Hack, Decorgals Pose Box, etc.) but you can also achieve great results from just playing around in the game, using the everyday animations, pausing the game and finding great poses.
Tip: Using the slowmotion cheat works great. Press Ctrl Alt + C to get the cheat box up and then type in 'slowmotion *number between 0-8*'. I use 'slowmotion 5' but it is up to you!

Here are a few great poses:

Shy

How I did it: Being flirted with.

Secretive:

How I did it: Gossiping.

Evil:

How I did it: Scope Room.

Happy:

How I did it: Catching Butterflies.

Angry:

How I did it: Tell them to go somewhere they can't get to.

Confused:

How I did it: Tell them to go somewhere they can't get to.

So basically. Experiment with all that Maxis (and other Sim addicts) have given you and you'll surely be able to get some fantastic pictures!
If you want to you can PM me for help or comments on your pictures and I'll be brutally honest.

Hope this helps someone and I haven't just wasted the past few hours! LOL

Charlotte xXx

[/FONT]

[summer_wine]

^^ thanks for the different emotions tingy! i love them all. i will try to memorize them and if i can't i'll refer to it

[Hidden~Secret]

wow those are really great I never thought I could use those type of things but now I guess I can

[jason7871]

Ok i want to say too charlotterose23 "Thankies an Huggies a Bunches for that GIMP Tutorial".........................so i offer up a few  sims i did enhaced with that tutorial be Kind LOL...........

[Jagerjaques]

Not bad, Jason, your pictures are really coming along!

[jason7871]

Thanksie brendabond i think i have more too learn as well lol

[summer_wine]

oh wow jason those piccies are awesome! lovely work!

[worker104]

Seeking more on "gimp'' warming effect,I tried it and cant seem to overlay or flatten!

[chocolatedalek]

Someone said about a Paint.net tutorial, I don't think this is it, (Ms Paint), But I hope it helps anyway.

My Hitomi's Brother Takeo has offered to help in this tutorial.





















I hope this helps!!

[avexkoo]

I guess I can do a simple filtering tutorial on Paint.NET (ver 3.10). I used PS in the past, but it was in school so I didn't have it for personal use, and didn't know about GIMP until recently. I like Paint.NET because it's also free and fairly easy to use.

1. Warm Effect- With Paint.NET you don't really get the same result using the gaussian blur layer overlay as in PS, let me show you what you can do though.

So here is the original in-game pic I took with print screen key.



Not a bad pic quality, but in the original pic size the image is a bit blurry, and colors look faded. Let's fix that shall we?

Step 1. Go up to the menu bar and click on Effects, and you'll see a list of choices on a drop-down menu, choose Sharpen, a small window will pop up where you can adjust sharpness, for this tutorial I used x2, I don't really like to sharpen it too much, but up to x6 is a pretty good range.

Step 2. Let's see how it looks if I try the gaussian blur layer overlay, so duplicate the original layer, go to Effects and choose gaussian blur in the sub-menu, set it on 5 when a window pops-up. Then go to layer properties, and change the blending mode from normal to overlay. You'll end up with something like this.



The colors look more vibrant, but it doesn't really have the glowy effect that PS has. But hey, there's a glow effect so let's use that. For this example I used default setting for radius (6) and contrast (10), but set brightness to -20 since the glow effect really brightens the imgage on default setting. And tada, the final result looks like this.



Now it does have the glowy warm effect, you can adjust sharpeness again to your preference, I ended up using x6 sharpeness because I didn't want to lose the detail on the model's facial features.

2. Soften Portrait- So you have to go an extra step in Paint.NET to achieve warm effect, not bad, but for 3.10 version which just released, there's a new effect called "soften portrait", hey that sounds a lot like warm effect, let's see what this thing does.... start out with the same original pic, click on Effects and choose soften portrait, the pop-up window has 3 adjustments, for this example I used default settings for softness and warmth, but set lighting a bit higher at 10. And tada, cool looking image in just one step, no need to duplicate layer nor use glow effect. The colors are not as vibrant, but it's a different look. Adjusting the warmth will make the colors less brownish. But don't forget to sharpen it a little, I used x2.



You can also use the gaussian blur layer overlay for the first step, then instead of using glow, try soften portrait, and you get this.



You can definitely see the glowy effect now, and the image is quite dramatic.

That's the end of tutorial, hope it helps.