The Grumpy One's Wallpaper Tutorials

GrumpyOne

I have used a trial version of TechSmith's Camtasia to capture me creating the wallpaper of Dina that I posted in my thread. This is a bit of a special case. The background is very even, so I was able to do a good job with the hair quite easily.

http://www.forumophilia.com/download.php?id=376597

I use a variation of the technique that Stallion posted in his thread. Instead of laying down a series of lines and adjusting them, I create the bezier curves as I go. I find that this technique is easier to control and I can create a more precise cutout.

http://www.forumophilia.com/viewtopic.php?t=63355

This is just the raw video capture converted to Adobe Flash. You will see all my mistakes as I go along. The video runs about 13 minutes (and yes, that's roughly how long it took me to do this wallpaper). To view the video, download this file and then use your web brower that has a Flash plugin to open and view it.

http://rapidshare.com/files/144997157/Dina.swf.html

I find all of the static screen capture tutorials quite interesting, but you need to be quite familiar with Photoshop to follow what is happening. I would like comments on whether or not this video is of interest to anyone. If it is, I can go back and annotate the file to explain what I am doing, and perhaps create some more tutorials on different techniques.

The Grumpy One

GrumpyOne · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 12:38 am Post subject: Hair - Part 1

The attached file is a Windows .exe file made with a trial version of Adobe Captvate. It is the first of three tutorials on working to make hair look good in a wallpaper.

http://rapidshare.com/files/146461026/Hair_demo.exe

I tried Captivate because Camtasia was a pain to work with. Captivate seems to create good quality, but is mainly aimed at web based users. Output is either a whole string of Adobe Flash files or the player embedded in the .exe file that I used for this tutorial.

The Grumpy One

GrumpyOne

You may have heard me whine about the quality related issues with the Teen Funs images. I have taken the image that I used in another thread

http://www.forumophilia.com/download.php?id=381523, sized it down to 640 x 480 and applied 4 different quality levels for jpeg files in Photoshop. It's not difficult to see, as the file size gets smaller, the image quality gets worse too. Jpeg is a "lossy" compression algorithm, which means you lose data every time you manipulate it and save it as a new jpg.

I have also magnified one part of the image to better show up the quality loss and compression artifacts. Photoshop allows 13 different levels of compression, with 0 having the highest compression and 12 the lowest. You can see compression artifacts quite easily in quality settings 0 and 4. If you look closely, there is a bit noise even with quality setting 8.

What this really shows is that larger images are much better to work with than smaller ones. Compression artifacts and resolution will cause issues in your images when you work on wallpapers. Sharpening filters, the unsharpen mask might help, but also will likely introduce additional noise into the image.

What does this all mean? Larger, higher quality images produce better results with a lot less effort. If you are planning to create wallpapers and you are accessing a site that offers multiple size / quality levels, grab the largest, highest quality image you can. The same goes for the wallpapers you create, bigger is better, within reason. I have found that staying in the 350KB to 450KB range tends to be good enough when posting wallpapers. Unless you are planning to use a very large monitor at extremely high resolution, your results should be fine. If you are planning to print them out, remember that whatever you see on the monitor will be about 1/4 the size in a print. Working on a monitor, 72 dpi is quite normal, but a printer runs at 300 dpi.