Posts tagged how-to
Jul 12th
HomestarRunner is a wonderful site that caught my eye many years ago. When I first discovered the site, the graphics were on par with Pong. Over the years it has developed into what we it now is today. After a very long break from this site, I returned only to find a million new games, stories, and great new graphics! When I used to regularly visit it, there were a few games, extra videos, and a weekly Strong Bad email. The basis for this site is a group of 11 characters who are the only apparent residents of a town. The original producers Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel created HomestarRunner in 1996, and later in 1999 Mike’s brother Matt joined the crew to assist in the production of the site itself.
The site itself has 6 main sections: Toons, Games, Characters, Downloads, Store, and Email. Toons consists of a collection of random flash videos put together for any reason whatsoever. The videos range from exploits of an R-Rated movie by Strong Bad to the famous Teen Girl Squad episodes. But even more famous than TGS is the weekly Strong Bad Email. This is one of the original features of the website that many remember from years ago. There are also many games like Peasant’s Quest and Trogdor. Most of the games originated from previous Strong Bad Emails. A lot of these games are purposefully horrific looking, to impose an old school feeling to them. They are rather fun to play, however. Peasant’s Quest is perhaps the most famous of the games on HomestarRunner. You are a peasant whos cottage has been burninated by Trogdor. You must walk around and become a hero by acquiring items and typing “look” and “search”, etc, to be allowed up the mountain before your impending doom. The Character’s section just gives a video description of each character presented by themselves. Downloads is where you can get all of you Homestarrunner sounds for your computers and desktop icons and such. You can get into the “secret” section by clicking on the “0.00 dollars” in the “$” area, dragging the credit card into the slot at the top-right, and typing in 5675 as the pin code. The Store is an external link where you can buy t-shirts, hoodies, dvds, posters, and many more things to keep the website going! All of the merchandise also originates from toons on the site. The Email section is where you can email them with questions, or complements, and also for the F.A.Q. of the site.
HomestarRunner is a wonderful site that makes me laugh everytime I visit it. Its definitely worth checking out whether you have an hour or ten minutes. Most of the toons run under 3 minutes if you don’t have much time to watch.
P.S. Firefox users can view the site in full screen with the addon known as “Full Screen Homestar Runner“.
Jun 22nd
The long awaited Part 2 of PST. The second tutorial is: Blending two images together on top of each other, an example would be a television screen and the sea, as used in this tutorial. As I started this tutorial, I saw that the main purpose was not to add an effect, but rather just simply combine what you already have at your disposal together into a single image. For this tutorial you need to find two, not one, images. To follow the tutorial correctly, you want to find a great picture of a television from the same angle as a landscape or a family photo because the two pictures will be overlayed upon each other. Chad Neuman, the creator of this tutorial, wants to express the feeling of an image on a Television that is being displayed realistically. I once again browsed Google, and found this. I thought that this was a great head on view that would be easy to work with. I then simply found another picture from the same angle. After saving both of the pictures to my hard drive (so as not to leech bandwidth from their sites) I opened up my trusty photoshop.
Once you open both pictures in Photoshop, drag the larger photo (the one that will be on the inside of the screen) onto the picture of the television. First, you want to make sure that your tv screen is transparent. You do this simply by selecting the magic wand tool and clicking on the white part of the television screen layer. The flaw in this is, following the tutorial you are left with a locked background layer. An easy way to fix it is to simply duplicate the television layer (ctrl + j) and then use your magic wand tool to select the white, and then press the delete button. If for some reason this does not work, you can use the marquee tool to select portions and delete them individually. Now, you completely ignore the original background layer, making background copy your television layer, and layer 1 your scenery picture. Hide the background layer by clicking on the eye. When you drag your scenery picture on top of your TV screen picture, chances are it is gigantic or very small. To resize it, press ctrl + t on your keyboard and use the corners to expand or shrink the image. I explained it because in the tutorial it assumes you already have the corners on the picture selected, which may not be the case. As you work on step 9, you want to make sure that when you select the pen tool that you have the shape layer feature enabled. After that, it is VERY self explanatory. Once you finish, you may notice the image being slightly dark. This is cured by selecting a very light image, as the author did. I finished following his tutorial exactly with this. However, after careful inspection one can see that the image is not very pleasing to the eye, and so I had to adjust. Anyone reading this and working through the tutorial should note there are ways to fix darkening of an image. I prefer to set the layer to normal, duplicating, making the duplicated overlay, lowering it to around 33%, and erasing the darkest parts using a 20 soft pxl eraser. After those adjustments I ended up with this fabulous image.
In conclusion, Chad Neuman did an excellent job creating this tutorial. It was very easy to follow, yet most of his tutorial had only to do with the image he used, instead of the tutorial being applicable to any image. I thank him for his time and effort he put into it, and I also thank Photoshop Tutorials for their wonderful tutorials.
