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Forum Replies Created
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Hey Alan–and Joel,
Been trying to answer y’all’s posts but The Cow wouldn’t cooperate till this morning.
Hey, for all my sniping, I do love my PI. It would be worth that reasonable upgrade price just to get access to all the new emitter libs–say nothing of the enhanced features and speed.
And thanx heaps Alan for those codec tips. Tried Lagarith and I’m astounded. Just assumed compression = loss–but you’ve re-educated me.
Speak of better compression, I’ve just been working with Flash CS3 and its video import quality has improved exponentially. This may not seem pertinent to PI, but check out my new “particle emitter” breakthrough, via Flash:
https://www.efn.org/~mikemcoo/greenBetter1.html
Again Alan and Joel, thanx for your thoughtful responses to my query.
z -
Hey Alan–and Joel,
Been trying to answer y’all’s posts but The Cow wouldn’t cooperate till this morning.
Hey, for all my sniping, I do love my PI. It would be worth that reasonable upgrade price just to get access to all the new emitter libs–say nothing of the enhanced features and speed.
And thanx heaps Alan for those codec tips. Tried Lagarith and I’m astounded. Just assumed compression = loss–but you’ve re-educated me.
Speak of better compression, I’ve just been working with Flash CS3 and its video import quality has improved exponentially. This may not seem pertinent to PI, but check out my new “particle emitter” breakthrough, via Flash:
https://www.efn.org/~mikemcoo/greenBetter1.html
Again Alan and Joel, thanx for your thoughtful responses to my query.
z -
The casuist swindler’s classic fall back: caveat emptor.
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Always work uncompressed ‘less the customer needs it small or it’s going out on the web–but hey that makes sense. Loaded my original into Prem and saved it out (I thought) uncompressed but it then loaded fine into PI.
And yes, that’s prob’ly valid advice, to upgrade. It’s just that I’ve always had a smidge of resentment here, after having spent three hundred dollars for my version and had this as a response to every single problem I’ve ever had with it: upgrade.
(Guess I didn’t realize I was paying to beta test this software).
Thanx Alan, for your helpful advice,
z -
[Boyd Hawkins] “Does using a green screen work in Photoshop like it does in video production? If so, I could not find the filter for it….please advise.”
There may be color and luminance keying options in CS2–but I ain’t found them yet.
When I have solid color background in a shot and need to isolate foreground elements, I’ve found that the keying functions of AfterEffects work pretty well.
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This is a great tute, Darby. Thanx, for posting in such detail.
Definitely a keeper.
Best,
M -
OK, the alpha channel is what you’re going to use to cut your person out from the background, so, by looking good, wuzel meant the alpha channel needs to be as starkly black and starkly white as you can make it.
When you select the red channel that you just duplicated as an alpha, you’ll see that it’s now a black and white version of your original pic.
Go into Image/Adjustments/Levels, and you’ll get a window with a graph in the center that looks roughly like the cross section of a mountain range. Under it are three adjustment sliders, black on the left, grey in the center and white on the right.
Slide the white adjustment button to the left till the lighter areas in the picture become stark white, then slide the grey adjustment button to the right till the dark areas of the pic become stark black.
Now, once the alpha image is almost completely black and completely white (with no grey areas), click and drag this image to the bottom of the channels palette to the left most option icon, “load channel as selection.”
On the PC this can also be done by control/clicking the channel.
Go back into the layers palette, and, if your background image (the original image) is not “locked,” go into the pulldown Layers menu and choose Layer Mask/Hide Selection.
(If the background image is “locked,” you’ll see a little padlock icon on the right in its description, so just duplicate the layer to get an unlocked version, then be sure to delete the original layer, then procede as above).
All the background of the image should be removed, leaving just your figure in the foreground.
Hair is always tricky, so you’ll have to try several versions of your black’n white alpha layer as a mask to cut away only what you need from the background of the image.
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And now, thanx to your informative nudge, I am paying attention to all those options in the save window that I never even glanced at before.
Prior to this, you wouldn’t believe all the hoops I had to jump through to creat a brush with a transparent background.
It is kinda funny, how tedious this in in pShop compared to other programs like ImageFX and DogWaffle–but I s’pose that is kinda like comparing a battleship to a p-shooter.
(Can’t just jump in and take off–but, once you get it running, its power is a bit awesome).
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Omagod, this is fabulous.
Realized that all the brushes I’d created last week and saved as .bmp’s were by your “Channels, new alpha–Layer Mask/Hide Selection” method.
Loaded into FlashMX, their backgrounds were transparent as desired.
Yesterday, when I did a simple Filter/Extract brush and tried to save it as a .bmp or .psd, there was no transparency.
Saving it as a .tif, transparency data was available for saving–and it worked!
And now I’ll know where to look for transparency info, in the save options for given formats.
(A pending deadline, so you really saved me on this one, wurz).
Thanx a meg,
M -
You see my brush still needs some serious work–but it’s a start:
https://www.efn.org/~mikemcoo/dragonflyNymph.html
Again wuz, thanx heaps,
M