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- #1
I've used PS for many years, since even before it had CS attached to its version number.
But I'll admit--I've been mired in "Intermediate" (actually, that's probably overstating my skills--really skilled Beginner, perhaps) for many, many years. I knew how to do a few things really well, and that was fine, because a few things were all I had need of.
But the past few years, as my photography has progressed, I find myself needing a lot better skills. And I've been learning, a lot. Heck, I hadn't even worked with layers or masking until about a year ago! Sad, but true!!
Anyway…one of my goals this year is to really up my PS skills. Maybe not to Advanced, but at least a more solid Intermediate.
My current "project" is playing with smoke photography--I'm also doing it to try to give my creative juices a post-winter boost, but it also has the advantage of requiring me to venture into some new territory with PS. I've done smoke photography before, but just the basic stuff--post processing was just adjusting some settings in ACR, maybe inverting and adding a gradient, that sort of thing.
Now, I want to take ONE smoke photo image, use several copies of that same image, layered and then rotated--a composite, that's what I want. But using copies of the same single image.
But I'm struggling. It's not working the way I thought it would.
Here's what I've done so far (other than the basic processing):
1. Cropped my image to the portion I wanted to use and duplicate. The result was a 8" square image.
2. Resized my canvas to a 16" square, to allow adequate room to add multiple copies of the image layered on top of each other.
3. Selected the image and duplicate that layer. Okay, now I have TWO identical layers.
4. Selected the top layer (the new "copy") and rotated it.
That's as far as I've gotten, and I have two major problems I'm getting frustrated by.
1. The top layer covers the bottom layer completely. I can see one or the other, but not both--am I going to have to mask every copy or something? That would be a major buttload of work, wouldn't it?
2. When I rotated that top layer--the bottom layer rotates too! I want to rotate JUST that one layer, so that the smoke in that image is pointed a different direction than in the original image. I'm assuming that this is because I used "duplicate layer" and I should do this a different way?
If anyone even knows what I'm talking about and wants to chime in, with either some help themselves, or a good tutorial, I'd appreciate it. I've searched and searched for a tut on doing what I want, but I'm evidently not savvy enough to know the right keywords to get me the results I need for this.
But I'll admit--I've been mired in "Intermediate" (actually, that's probably overstating my skills--really skilled Beginner, perhaps) for many, many years. I knew how to do a few things really well, and that was fine, because a few things were all I had need of.
But the past few years, as my photography has progressed, I find myself needing a lot better skills. And I've been learning, a lot. Heck, I hadn't even worked with layers or masking until about a year ago! Sad, but true!!
Anyway…one of my goals this year is to really up my PS skills. Maybe not to Advanced, but at least a more solid Intermediate.
My current "project" is playing with smoke photography--I'm also doing it to try to give my creative juices a post-winter boost, but it also has the advantage of requiring me to venture into some new territory with PS. I've done smoke photography before, but just the basic stuff--post processing was just adjusting some settings in ACR, maybe inverting and adding a gradient, that sort of thing.
Now, I want to take ONE smoke photo image, use several copies of that same image, layered and then rotated--a composite, that's what I want. But using copies of the same single image.
But I'm struggling. It's not working the way I thought it would.
Here's what I've done so far (other than the basic processing):
1. Cropped my image to the portion I wanted to use and duplicate. The result was a 8" square image.
2. Resized my canvas to a 16" square, to allow adequate room to add multiple copies of the image layered on top of each other.
3. Selected the image and duplicate that layer. Okay, now I have TWO identical layers.
4. Selected the top layer (the new "copy") and rotated it.
That's as far as I've gotten, and I have two major problems I'm getting frustrated by.
1. The top layer covers the bottom layer completely. I can see one or the other, but not both--am I going to have to mask every copy or something? That would be a major buttload of work, wouldn't it?
2. When I rotated that top layer--the bottom layer rotates too! I want to rotate JUST that one layer, so that the smoke in that image is pointed a different direction than in the original image. I'm assuming that this is because I used "duplicate layer" and I should do this a different way?
If anyone even knows what I'm talking about and wants to chime in, with either some help themselves, or a good tutorial, I'd appreciate it. I've searched and searched for a tut on doing what I want, but I'm evidently not savvy enough to know the right keywords to get me the results I need for this.
