I’m behind again on my NAPP Battles… Life has been calling me away from playing…

I received my Adobe Master Collection CS4 on Thursday and did up the install while fighting the onset of what turned out to be a migraine that decided to try to last 2.5 days… Still not feeling well on Saturday I figured playing around with the Battle images I have missed recently would be a great way to test Photoshop CS4 out with out taxing the head too strenuously…

First thing noted from playing with Photoshop CS4… my ATI x850 isn’t going to cut it for the video card requirements so now trying to decide between just upgrading the video card and hanging on this system for another 9 months or so or plunging now into building a new system… at this point I’m leaning toward the video card since even though my system is 5 yrs old the bottleneck seems to be the video card not the cpu…

Anyway… On to the Battle Images for weeks 136-139 in order:

And my composite… just a fun little image…

Small lesson learned… some of the shortcuts have moved around.
load luminosity as a selection is no longer CTRL-ALT-~ it is now CTRL-ALT-2… drove me nuts trying to figure that one out…

And a neat new feature – you can now employ perspective and shear transforms to smart objects – this was done to make the raft out of the image for week 138.

Here is my 3rd image in the 5 round one-on-one Battle I’m doing on NAPP.

I named it "Strolling Through the Universe"

Rounds 1 and 2 can be found in this post.

Another member on NAPP challenged me to a one on one battle in which we bat images back and forth between each other keeping at least one element from the previous to create a new image. The battle is for 5 rounds and so far I’ve done 2 – below are the images I’ve created.

First here are the starting images I used for the first round. The image of the girl is what was served to me.

Completed image.

And here is my 2nd round.

Hard to believe I haven’t posted since 24 August… Well actually maybe not… I lost a harddrive in there right before Labor Day Weekend… No data was lost – luckily I regularly backup… but it did take awhile to get things back up and running smoothly.

Battle 131 started with:

I rendered some cylinders in Illustrator and then set the image as the surface to come up with with the fireworks. The wicks were made with a custom brush I created in Photoshop and the fire was simple painted:

Then there was Battle 132‘s starting image:

I used the pen tool in photoshop to trace several of the front petals and then took 3 of the petals and morphed them into a butterfly wing. That was then duplicated and rotated about the horizon to create the butterfly…

Finally, last weeks (Battle 133) image was:

The framing on this was created using another image from stock-exchange of a bamboo ladder.

It has been a while since I’ve posted… life has been… interesting… we came home from vacation to find problems with our water well. Three weeks later and a new well pump, things seem to be working again finally.

Next step was to actually do our ‘Summer Project’ of refinishing the deck. So we pressure washed it, scrapped it, cleaned it up, painted it and it rained… and rained… so we had to sand that off and repainted today. Hopefully it will dry and be done now!

I’m several battles behind so yesterday I wanted to try to figure out a way to bring Battles 126-130 altogether… and they had so much in common! NOT….. 126 (ruins) 127 (surfboard beach shot) 128 (pin cushion) were all quite easily added… Had a bit more problems with 129 – the metal piece… so I inverted, converted to polar coordinates and then use the distort twirl to it and it became wall art… This week’s image (130 – the old paper) was set to multiply over the images in the tv screen itself.

All other elements were designed from scratch in ps… obviously the most time was spent on the etch-a-sketch type TV…

Here are the originals.

 

And here is the composite.