362 - Stollen Property

Day 362. We enjoyed a traditional German Black Forest Stollen cake at Christmas. It's like a cake and bread together. Anyway, I was slicing up a few pieces of stollen this morning and took a photo of it using Adobe Shape which turns it into a vector image, then imported it into Adobe Photoshop Touch to add some brushed colour and an extra layer, blended together with a lighten blend mode.

329 - 30 Years, Just Like That

Day 329. Just over 30 years ago I played bass in a fun little art school band called The Jellybabies with two mates, +Rob Hughes and +Andrew Wilkinson . We had some good times playing in Sydney pubs during the early 80s, an amazing time in general for music. Rob, Andy and I met up a while back and retook a photo that we used for promotional shots back in 1983. Today I used a free morphing tool called MorphX to blend the our twenty-something selves together with our fifty-something selves. Yeah, that's right, we haven't changed a bit. :-)

314 - Magierasaurus Rex

Day 314. As the team assembles today in Mountain View for some fun at the Googleplex, I got a message from my friend Jennie Magiera complaining that the tray table on her flight was too far away for to use with her "short T-Rex arms". I had visions f Jennie as a T-Rex, so knocked up this quick image in Photoshop.

313 - Japantown

Day 313. While visiting San Francisco I met up with the wonderful Nicole Dalesio, her husband Alex and friend Marcos. We ended up going for a walk through Japantown in SF, where I took this shot of the stylised pagoda. A few touch ups in Photoshop for effect.

265 - A Hive of Activity

Day 265. During the Google Teacher Academy today I set up my GoPro camera at the front of the room and let it take a shot every second to create this animation of our working space during a short break in the event. This set of about 400+ images was imported into Photoshop CC as an image sequence, resized to a more manageable size, cropped and exported as a GIF.

243 - Face Off

Day 243. I took my own photo in an app called Face Goo, which lets you stretch and distort an image as though it was on a sheet if rubber. Once distorted I opened the image in Photoshop Mix, an Adobe app that easily extracts an image from the background and lets you put a different background in its place. The background art was drawn in Repix. Then the whole lot was exported into Photoshop Touch and had a series of filters and effects applied to it, and this is what I ended up with.

 

237 - Searching for Creativity

Day 237. A student of mine visited the Museum of Contemporary Art recently and showed me a series of photos she took there with her new fisheye lens.I particularly liked this one, so I thought I'd make something similar, because, well, everything is a remix.  So I printed this page of Google Search results for the word "creativity" then got a ruler, pencil, scissors and glue, cut up the paper and glued it back together like this. Then I photographed it with my Nexus 5, manipulated it a bit in Photoshop, and here is the result.

212 - Wish Upon A Star

Day 212. I'm in Los Angeles at the moment and tonight I decided to visit Hollywood. It's glitzy and tacky but kind of fun. I checked out the famous movie star names along the sidewalk, and took a peek at the hand and foot prints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I think it pretty much reinforced the notion that Hollywood is really not my thing, but it was interesting nonetheless.

As I was looking at all the stars for the celebrities that litter the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, I imagined seeing my own daughter's name there one day. Kate is studying acting at WAAPA and has serious aspirations or being an actor at the highest level. So to help with the visualisation process I removed the name* from one of the stars and added hers instead.

One day Katie!

*Shh, don't tell Russell Crowe.

196 - Characteristic

Day 196. I was sitting in the K-2 library yesterday waiting for some iPads to update so I pulled out a couple of children's books at random and took photos of the characters on the covers. Then I used a new app from Adobe called Photoshop Mix which lets you easily eXtract images from their backgrounds and used it to combine a few different cover images into one combined composite image. I then composited it one more time with a background image I drew in Repix, then imported the whole stack into Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad where I played with the colour saturation, etc, and added a few effects. This is the final result, which is made of several randomly selected individual book covers.

I find it interesting that even though the characters in this image came from totally different books, it would not be at all difficult to come up with a story based on this image that involved all four characters.

190 - Spell with Flickr

Day 190. I felt my main blog at www.chrisbetcher.com was in need of a new site banner so I remembered a really fun tool called Spell with Flickr. You type in the words you want and it replaced the letters with images of letters it find in random Flickr images. You can fine tune it by clicking the letters to swap them out for different ones if you don't like them. It's not included in this example, but the tagline on my blog is "education + technology + ideas" so if you head over to the blog you'll see that I also made up these words as well and then used Photoshop to assemble them into a small collage on the right side of the banner, then scaled the whole thing to fit the required pixel banner size in my Wordpress template.

189 - Growing Lad

Day 189. One really useful creative technique with Photoshop is simply being able to clean up a damaged image. This original baby photo of me was a 35mm Kodachrome slide that was very faded, dusty and scratched. I used the touchup tools in Photoshop to clean it up, then made it black and white and it now looks much better.

182 - Giving You The Bird

Day 182. Took a photo of this beautiful parrot this morning on my Nexus 5, then brought it into Adobe Photoshop Touch on my iPad mini. I extracted the bird from its background and applied a comic effect with posterised colours and dark edges, then placed a different background behind it, blurred it with a Gaussian blur effect, then used a splatter filter to turn it into paint blobs. Finally merged down the layers, did some colour correction, and cropped it.

Final verdict? Photoshop Touch packs some serious image editing power, and anyone who tells you the iPad is just a "consumption device" has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, and I like the bird too.

 

174 - Facing Off

Day 174. I quite liked the faces I made for yesterday's create so I chose one and kept app smashing it through other apps. Starting with a identikit face made in FlashFace and then coloured with Warhol:DIY, I then opened it in Repix and applied a series of filters and effects to it, then brought it into Adobe Photoshop Touch to tweak the colours and textures a little more. App smashing, or passing an artefact through a series of apps can come up with some interesting results.

 

153 - Hidden Secret

Day 153. While waiting at the airport tonight to fly to Brisbane, I walked past this Victoria's Secret store in the terminal and noticed how much overlap there is between the word Secret and the word Create. With a bit of Photoshop Touch on the iPad, I moved a few letters around while on the plane and this is the result.

142 - Zombie Art

Day 142. This carton zombie was made with an iPad app called, appropriately, Make a Zombie. After I made it, I took the image into Photoshop Touch and applied a few different filters, eventually ending up with this.

138 - Way Too Much Maui

Day 138. Linda and I are getting married next year in Maui, Hawaii. We are putting all the information about the wedding for family and friends on a website, soon to be published publicly.

I've been working on some ideas for the banner artwork to go across the top of the website, and I've come up with a few designs in Photoshop but I really can't decide which ones I prefer (if any!). So my daily create today is just to share some of the designs I've been working on.

You can enlarge each of these banners to full size by clicking on them.

136 - Make yourself a Gnome

Day 136. Pull up a toadstool and make yourself a Gnome. I've spent the day at the Sydney Adobe office today with my Year 11 Computing Applications class, doing a Photoshop workshop with Adobe trainer Renee Lance. We have been exploring some really cool stuff that can be done in Photoshop while learning a bunch of great digital imaging techniques. Here's a fun image I made as we learned about extracting and placing images on new layers, using filters, etc.

135 - Feather Face

Day 135. More Photoshop today. Looking at layers and blend modes and stuff.

131 - Everything Old Is New Again

Day 131. Today's create is just a task I created for my Year 11 Computing students. We are learning about digital imaging techniques at the moment, and I'm setting them a series of weekly skill development tasks. Last week we looked at compositing, and this week is about retouching.

Here is this week's task. As you can tell, I run this class in a sort of flipped/online mode. I don't actually see the students face to face all that much, but run it almost entirely in online mode, event though we are physically at the same school. I blame timetabling issues, but it does actually work pretty well.

This image below is only the first page... if you're at all interested, the full document can be seen here.

111 - The Ant Mill

Day 111. For today's daily create I used an iPad app called TypeDrawing. It enables you to take a piece of text and load it as the "paint", so that dragging your finger then draws with the words. I found this piece of text on the National Geographic website that talked about ant mills, and so I tried to make a visual connection with the text and the image.

The text was drawn with TypeDrawing, then imported into Adobe Photoshop Touch, where a png file of an ant, (with a transparent background) was added to complete the story.