Keith Lord - Online Portfolio

Previously I mentioned of my interest in Flickrvision. Well I recently discovered Twittervision, same basic principle of Flickrvision but with people’s “tweets”.
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Todays quote come from my dearest.

“what the hell are you doing to my eyes”

Taken out of context one could wonder what on earth she is referring too. She was of course refering to a test image of the new navigation bar I am working on for the MOUL site.
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I have been digging through some old Uru stuff on my computer recently, and it got me thinking about the comparisons between Uru “Prologue” Live and Uru Live. I’m not going to address the fact that Prologue never made it out of beta because that doesn’t seem fair.
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So we have structured HTML/XHTML, we have structured CSS but it seems like a rarity to find a structured .PSD file.
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So a few weeks back Ryan (GreyDragon) popped up on MSN and asked me and Denis (amon-re) if we would be interested in interning at Cyan, so we said yes.
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Hooray for lame titles.

Interesting day on the Apple front. Was keeping track with the live blogging Engadget was doing of the event.
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You would think after the incident with my passport things would start looking up.

Simply put, no!
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Tomorrow is the end of “Jen Time”. I fly back to the UK and bide my time before I can spend some more time with my loved ones. The last few days of my visit are always difficult, both of us push it out of our minds but it sneaks in on occasion and upsets the both of us.
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I’ve been contemplating getting Guild Wars for a while now, the prospect of an online game with no monthly fee appealed to me greatly. Jen has been looking for a new game to play herself and had been looking at Guild Wars too, so we decided to get a copy (each) so that we could play together.
I have been playing World of Warcraft since it pretty much came out, so it was natural that I would be comparing the two games as I played. Sure enough I was noting which elements in WoW should be in GW (the ability to jump for one, and the less restrictive terrain WoW has), I also noted which elements from Guild Wars should be in WoW (mission map for example).
Movement was a huge issue for me in GW to start off with, I couldn’t get my avatar to move when I use the mouse buttons, sometimes it would work other times it wouldn’t. It was only when I discovered that I need to press the right mouse button before applying the left that things got easier and sure enough with several days I play I have gotten pretty comfortable with the game mechanisms.

It has been a pretty enjoyable game, some of the environments are really nice, one of the things about WoW is how “Disney-like” the environments can be, if they were a little more realistic bit more graphic intensive then that would be cool, I can see why they are not however when bandwidth and lag is taken into consideration. Debating whether to purchase the expansion packs for Guild Wars, and whether to get Guild Wars 2 when it is released.

This tutorial will explain how to create a simple brush in Photoshop for use in artwork. Just a note this tutorial we be updated with how to group the brushes your created into a single pack for convenience.

Step 1

First we will need the image we want to use for a brush, in this case I used the picture of the Cleft found on CyanWorlds website. I copied the image to a new canvas in Photoshop and cropped the image so it wasn’t to big.

Step 2

Next we grey-scale the image, to do this we hold ctrl+u on the layer the image is on and when the Hue/Saturation box comes up, we shift the Saturation slider to the far left.

Step 3

Now that we have done that, it is now time to define the brush, to do this we go to Edit -> Define Brush.

Step 4

Name the brush to what you want it to be (in this case we named the brush cleft-brush) and click ok.

Step 5

Congratulations the brush has now been created, click the brush tool and then go to the brush selection box and scroll down, there you will find your brush.

Step 6

Well there isn’t really a step 6, the brush is completed and is ready for use.

It is always an idea to keep a back up of your brushes, whether it is in the brush back format (.abr files for Photoshop) or in .jpg format just in case Photoshop resets the brushes. I keep a folder with them in .jpg format myself.

This leads to the last few steps, or sub steps. As you can see in the above image some of the brushes have a grey background to them, this can cause issues when you are using the brush, as the grey background will show up like so;

This easy to fix.

Step 7

Starting with the original image used for the brush (if you no longer have the original image, you can select the brush to fix, set the colour to black and paint it onto a simple white background).

Step 8

Now we alter the contrast to make the grey background white, to do this we go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast. We up the brightness a little so the background becomes white, we then edit the contrast to make the black parts of the brush black (as they may turn grey when increasing the brightness), being mindful not to increase the contrast to much otherwise the edges of the brush become jagged.

Click ok, save the brush again, delete the old one (if there is an old one) and you will be good to go.