Tommy Yune's MWCon09 Photoshop Talk?

[grapetang]

For those who attended Tommy Yune's photoshop talk during MWCon09,

can anyone provide an overview/synopsis of his talk? or better yet, a

detailed rundown of his process & techniques?

It would be great for those of us who weren't able to attend. I've read

his tips on layers & coloring from the old Photoshop 5/5.5 Wow! Book but

I'm sure he's advanced considerably since then.

General art, painting, photoshop, etc. tips & links can go here too.

Many thanks!

[polidread]

or maybe, if we're luckier, somebody had video coverage ?

[miriya]

I am going to try to remember some stuff off the top of my head. However it is possible that someone videoed. I dont remember >EXO< holding his camera at that point though.

He started with a Photoshop presentation projected on to a screen showing us a graphic for the special edition release of the shadow chronicles.

The document had many many layers and groups.

The first thing was the scanned sketch.

He said that scanning in as Grayscale is best at 300 or 600 DPI. He also mentioned later that for the photoshop document to use RGB mode for good layer effects and to flatten the image before converting to CMYK because the layer effects look different in CMYK mode.

He went to Levels to make the whites more white and the blacks more black.

Selected the white background and then select inverse making the actual sketch the selection.

Then I think he copied that selection on to a new layer.

Then using the lasso tool slected the area of the face that should be flesh toned with a manual selection.

Exo pointed out that the magnetic lasso would be a good option. Yune said that it would be but with areas where there are gaps in the line drawing the manual lasso works better.

Then filled the selection with flesh tone on a sperate layer.

Then he selected the area of the face where shadows would appear and put a deeper flesh tone color there.

He mentioned that for older girls characters the cheek bone lays higher and in younger it lays lower.

cont soon....

Edited July 21, 2009 by miriya

[miriya]

Trying to remember what came next. ..

He showed us the whole face all colored in and applied a blur to a copy of the group at a 30% opacity above the original to give a bit of a photographic film look to soften the clean clear sharpness of the animation.

He also showed us about using lighting effects by putting a white highlight on a black background using screen mode on the layer which allows you to utilize the hues and get a "lightsaber" type of colored glow. Something that can not be done on white alone. . . .

what was next?.....

[miriya]

He showed made the other two characters visible and applied a mask the the group of 3 characters to make a feathered shadow of black to transparent going from the bottom up so that they faded into darkness downwards. He said that this is better than feathering the selection of characters and deleting because if you change your mind later you still have the original.

He showed us how originally the girl was in the back behind the two male figures and once they submitted it, it came back to put the girl in front because pictures of hot girls sell good.

He also commented about how this was his charlies angels version with the flames behind.

Then he showed us the alpha fighter and how he did dodge and burn effects on it to create more depth to the colored line art.

Also he did not put the highlights at full opacity, a bit of an homage to the way that in the original series there would be some line art behind lighting effects. . . .

[miriya]

Trying to remember what happened next...

He showed us another graphic with all the characters together in the cockpit of the beta that I think he said was part of the box graphics for the toynami beta toy. (correct me if I am wrong). He showed how he put shadow effects on the characters behind the forground ones and how he used a mirror effect on a background where symmetry was involved instead of drawing both sides.

I am sure that I am leaving stuff out from the photoshop presentation so if anyone else remembers who was there they can contribute to this thread.....

As for the talk he did about the Live action Robotech movie that is posted on some robotech forum the link is somewhere around here right?

[KiriK]

good memory Miriya!

[miriya]

good memory Miriya!

Thanks Kirik. I know I forgot some stuff for sure and I also had to go to the bathroom at one point so I missed a bit of it.

I am finding it interesting that he mentioned during his talk about the live action robotech that he thought that the F-22 would be decommissioned soon and then in the news today we hear that is true. He must be deeper into this than we know. Maybe Harmony gold is owned by the defense department. j/k....

[grapetang]

Thanks, Miriya! Great, detailed overview. A lot of the initial stuff

is the same as his Wow! book segment from 2000. Neat idea w/ the

copy & blur at 30% opacity for photographic effect. Thanks!

As Polidread suggested. anyone have a video?

[chillyche]

Not that I'm some kinda photoshop wiz, but I want to point aspiring photoshoppers in another direction. A lot of people tend to use layers to separate out their various colors from their lineart, and this is fine, and easy, and intuitive, but the problem is that a file with a lot of layers is bulky and can get up there in file sizes, bogging down your system. It's also a bunch of layers to slog through. There's an alternative method called "flatting" which uses channels is a rather novel way.

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart1.html

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart2.html

This is an excellent two-part tutorial that shows you the process. The first half is basically the same thing, about preparing your line art, but the end of the first half and the second half are quite different from the layers method. Once you're done with flatting, the various highlights using blurs and layer modes and stuff still apply.

Have fun.

[jenius]

Totally off topic but I was looking up Tommy Yune's conversation and I found this recent CNN interview:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/ireporte...cid=VIDLRVNWS05

I was expecting an interview about Robotech.

[anime52k8]

Not that I'm some kinda photoshop wiz, but I want to point aspiring photoshoppers in another direction. A lot of people tend to use layers to separate out their various colors from their lineart, and this is fine, and easy, and intuitive, but the problem is that a file with a lot of layers is bulky and can get up there in file sizes, bogging down your system. It's also a bunch of layers to slog through. There's an alternative method called "flatting" which uses channels is a rather novel way.

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart1.html

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart2.html

This is an excellent two-part tutorial that shows you the process. The first half is basically the same thing, about preparing your line art, but the end of the first half and the second half are quite different from the layers method. Once you're done with flatting, the various highlights using blurs and layer modes and stuff still apply.

Have fun.

I've seen this tutorial before, I've given it a try, and for the life of me I cannot get the hang of using this. It may save space but using layers still feels more natural. personally I've always had more luck using vector masks to cut down file space.

Totally off topic but I was looking up Tommy Yune's conversation and I found this recent CNN interview:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/ireporte...cid=VIDLRVNWS05

I was expecting an interview about Robotech.

um... I think we talked about this in the RT thread a week ago.

[chillyche]

I definitely agree that layers feels more natural. I would never even consider using flats, except that I had a comic project I was working on a couple years ago, and when I switched to flatting from doing layers, I actually cut my time per page down by a quarter. It was crazy.

[Ganbare]

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart1.html

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart2.html

Worth to try.

Edited July 23, 2009 by Ganbare

[polidread]

oh, it's good to know we use similar methods at photoshopping things... XD

[akt_m]

Not that I'm some kinda photoshop wiz, but I want to point aspiring photoshoppers in another direction. A lot of people tend to use layers to separate out their various colors from their lineart, and this is fine, and easy, and intuitive, but the problem is that a file with a lot of layers is bulky and can get up there in file sizes, bogging down your system. It's also a bunch of layers to slog through. There's an alternative method called "flatting" which uses channels is a rather novel way.

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart1.html

http://www.steeldolphin.com/htmltuts/digital_colorpart2.html

This is an excellent two-part tutorial that shows you the process. The first half is basically the same thing, about preparing your line art, but the end of the first half and the second half are quite different from the layers method. Once you're done with flatting, the various highlights using blurs and layer modes and stuff still apply.

Have fun.

That's a good alternative, but wouldn't work for me.

[polidread]

by the way, Miriya, thanks for remembering the specifics of Tommy's lecture, you remembered the details well !

[miriya]

Thanks for the thanks. I am actually surprised in myself. I usually have a horrible memory. I guess that I was really interested and following it and because I use photoshop all the time, I understood what he was talking about. I hope that someone else who was there can fill in the details that i forgot though.

One thing that I forgot to add was that he was using photoshop 7!!!! He was praising photoshop 7 and even 5.5 for their fast performance. I currently use CS1 and CS3 but I have used 5.5 and 7 before.

[akt_m]

Older photoshops are faster, but the CS4 has some good new features... and it is acelerated by opengl.

[grapetang]

Thanks for the links, chillyche. I use the layers method but I'll give

it a try sometime. Feels like losing the safety net though.

Congrats on the fanart contest, polidread! and nice work, akt_m,

anime52k8, and temjin. I always love your watercolor style, akt_m;

it reminds me of Mikimoto's.

I use photoshop 6. I should probably just stick with pencils and study

& practice more.

[chillyche]

Thanks for the links, chillyche. I use the layers method but I'll give

it a try sometime. Feels like losing the safety net though.

Congrats on the fanart contest, polidread! and nice work, akt_m,

anime52k8, and temjin. I always love your watercolor style, akt_m;

it reminds me of Mikimoto's.

I use photoshop 6. I should probably just stick with pencils and study

& practice more.

If you use the flats properly, you still have all your color areas isolated in the flats channel, so you can easily just select all the skin areas, or whatever, and apply a global change to those. It's actually quite brilliant. On top of that, I think there are some free plugins that will automatically do flats for your lineart (if the line art doesn't have too many holes in it).

http://www.bpelt.com/psplugins/flatting.html

Of course, it doesn't choose colors that make sense, but you can easily select and replace those colors, or just ignore them totally.

Truth be told, though, if I'm just doing a quick piece, I often still use layers. But complex pieces or definitely comic pages I use flatting.

Here's another take on flatting, that actually bypasses using the channels, and does it in layers, but with fewer layers than some might normally use.

http://www.rnel.net/tutorial/Photoshop/3264

Edited July 26, 2009 by chillyche

[anime52k8]

link failed http://www.farlowstudios.com/tutorials/cre...toshop-updated/

[grapetang]

Wow. Lots of info there and it'll take a while to digest, let alone implement. Thanks!!!

[akt_m]

Congrats on the fanart contest, polidread! and nice work, akt_m,

anime52k8, and temjin. I always love your watercolor style, akt_m;

it reminds me of Mikimoto's.

Thx!