CRDESIGNLAB

This is three mini-posts smashed into one.

1: Catching Up.

It has been over a week since my last post. That’s just deplorable. I all honesty, I have lacked inspiration over the past few weeks. That might be partly due to the increasing workload as AP Exams approach. I will be taking three AP Tests in late April: AP Language, AP US History, and AP Chemistry. I have tried my best to manage the massive workload these three classes place upon my shoulders while at the same time trying to find time to work on Mac Lab stuff as the projects are only getting larger and more numerous. People don’t appreciate just how difficult it is to get an A in an AP class until they try. I have had to take a sort of break from my usual Mac Lab work to focus on maintaining my straight A’s, which has not always been possible. Unfortunately, I will have to find a way to work more on both regular classes and my Mac Lab projects at the same time. Oh, and I have to learn Final Cut Studio and After Effects as part of my duties to the video team, which I am now a member of. I have Adobe CS4 Design Premium and Apple Final Cut Studio on my home computer, but I don’t have After Effects, which means I will have to work on that during class.

While on the topic of video, I have to say that last Saturday was quite the day. I arrived at school at 5:30am and was the first person there, other than Mr. Skocko. A minute later, Danny and Cody arrived, followed by Philip, Fadi, Kyle, Aaron, Nikki, and a few others over the next three hours. We light painted for a few minutes while it was still dark, but the pictures didn’t turn out. When the filming for the Dodgeball video started, chaos broke out and it took us five hours to film a commercial that is less than a minute long. The finished product looks great, but it didn’t always look so good. Danny saved the day in Final Cut and After Effects. The best part of the day was that I learned a lot about video. I was Assistant Director (Danny was Director) and I set up about a third of the shots without his help. By the time the filming was over, I had gained a new skill and the confidence that came with it. High resolution version: right-click and download |  Low Resolution version.

At 2pm, Danny and I filmed the Theater Department’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, which was fantastic. I had never been to a school performance before, and really liked the play. Fadi tagged along but didn’t really do anything. By 5:15pm, after 11 hours and 45 minuets of work, we all left school and went out separate ways. Twelve hours working for the Mac Lab was a lot of fun.

2: A New Focus

Quite simply, my focus in the Mac Lab is changing. CRDESIGNLAB started out as a photography blog, but I think it will follow me and transition more towards other forms of media, most importantly video. Changes might be coming.

3: The 9 Days of Light Painting

Over Spring Break, I will have three tasks and only three tasks: finish Specialties for AP US History, read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for AP Language, and devote every other waking moment to the Mac Lab. As for the third of those tasks, I intend to spend most of my time light painting and working on tutorials. It’s about time I stop being lazy and actually get something done. Other than creating tutorials for light painting, I will try the new techniques Mr. Skocko has been urging me to employ over the pst few months. I will completely revamp my approach to light painting, and will hopefully produce the best work the Paint the World With Light project has seen yet.

As for these tutorials, I will use a combination of screen captures that explain the basics and camera setting and actual video footage of a light painting shoot, which should be filmed tomorrow.

I also have to work on the Valhalla 840 poster, which is coming together slowly. I am in charge of the Photoshopping, which is the majority of the project. Zack, Fadi, Philip (I think), and Kyle are also helping. We will have to combine our skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Cinema 4D to create a realistic poster. I don’t know if I am supposed to keep the theme a secret or not, so I’ll take the safe route and let you all just guess as to what masterpiece is sitting behind this Safari window on my computer right now. (Hint: if it works, it will be AMAZING!!!!!!) Photoshop CS5 and these tools would make the job infinitely easier. If only I knew someone with CS5…

That’s it for now. I bid you farewell for now and start planning the screen capture portion of my light painting tutorials.

Fun fact: for a few hours tomorrow I will have both of the Mac Lab’s 5D Mark II cameras. I will be carrying around $12,000 of technology as I go the site of the light painting tutorial.

Let the 9 Days of Light Painting begin!!!

Finally, after months of waiting, I have found time to make the first of many new tutorials for the “This Is How We Do It” page. I created a new category for miscellaneous photoshop tricks and made the first six movies of what will hopefully be a very long list of cool tips. I hope you like them. I am still struggling with how to teach light painting via screen captures, but those tutorials should be coming soon too. (I am still learning the art of making screen capture tutorials, so don’t be surprised if mine are in need of work)

On another note, I shuffled pages a little. I created the new “Resources” page, which leads to a modified version of the the old “Inspiration” page and the new “Tutorials and Helpful Sites” page. This new page, which is quite empty at the moment, will hopefully soon feature links to many tutorials and sites from various sources across the internet. For the time being, all these pages will be very sparse, but they should grow rapidly as we discover new, and remember old, sources of inspiration and education.

Wow. This post is long overdue. The last time CRDESIGNLAB featured any new text was seven days ago, when Kyle discussed elections. Over these seven days of darkness, I have been busy reworking old images that have been neglected or could be improved. I have taken some already posted images and improved them as well as started working on some completely new (never been touched) ones. In total, there are 12 new images for the galleries, and not a single one is less than a three weeks old. It is amazing how when browsing through old work you find that there are gems hidden amongst the madness. So that is what I have been doing: separating the gems from the madness. Grab a soda because there is a lot of reading ahead of you.

Image Number 1: The Dip, Version 4

For the fourth time, I have put serious effort towards improving this image, which is dubbed “Dip” because of a dip in the road just before the entrance to the Horton Plaza mall. I tried my best to whiten the building in the back and achieve color correctness while bringing out as much color as I can. There are still things that need to be fixed, like granulation in the road and the trees, but overall, I call it an improvement.

Image Number 2: Street 01, Version 3

Like the Dip, this image has seen its share of time in Photoshop. I spent so much time staring at Version 2, that I became blind to the horrible over-sharpening and excessive color. So, I decided to start all over with the original file and try to produce a less painful-to-look-at image. I think I succeeded. Although it looks dull when compared to the previous version, I think that Version 3 is much better and doesn’t have that awful look of over-proccessing.

Image Number 3: The Parking Lot, Version 1

This is a completely new image from the latest batch of light paintings, which Kyle, my sister, and I created on February 26. I took the picture as Kyle and my sister outlined the parking lot of the Monarch Ridge community pool with lightsabers. The original was deplorably over-exposed, but I saved the image in Photoshop.

Image Number 4: Street 03, Version 1

This is also a completely new image from the latest batch of light paintings. Captured just a few minutes before the Parking Lot image, Kyle manned the camera as my sister and I showed Kyle how to paint like a Jedi.

Image Number 5: Spiral 03, Version 2

Kyle and I took this picture on February 5 when we hung a flashlight from a ceiling fan. I originally wrote this image off as a dud because it looked sloppy and not interesting, but Kyle had a different idea. Over the past few days, he has been playing with it in Photoshop and has produced a really cool image. He took a poor test shot and turned it into gallery-worthy work. Not bad at all.

Image Number 6: Spiral 04, Version 1

While going through our old files, I found this spiral and decided to add it to our collection. After a little Photoshop work, it was up to par.

Image Number 7: The Tennis Court 01, Version 1

This image was taken the same day as the Parking Lot and Street 03 images and just a few yards away in my neighborhood tennis court. I manned the camera as Kyle and my sister traced the court lines with lightsabers. This is the first of two tennis court pictures, but the second one is on my iMac at school.

Image Number 8: Cactus 03, Version 1

This is another really old picture, dating back all the way to January 16, when Kyle and I spent a few hours photographing his backyard. I played with it in Camera Raw and am pleased with the result. It is interesting, in that I had to make the image all fuzzy and distorted and then negate that in order to avoid some strange red blotches that appeared wherever there are colors close to white. Basically, I blurred the image and then sharpened it enough to make the blur go away (in way more steps than that).

Image Number 9: The Leaf, Version 1

I have no idea where this image came from, just that it was in my files, so I decided to Photoshop it. I messed with the color of the leaf and kind of like the result. I had to gaussian-blur the background in order to remove distortion and I think I need to go back and mask the blur out of the focused areas with more precision.

Image Number 10: The Purple Cactus 01, Version 1

This image also came from January 16, and I decided to take a drastically different route in Photoshop. In Camera Raw, I completely blew out the colors as far as I could, taking the Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders all the way to the right. I am not sure if I like it or not, but I wanted to try something different, so I did.

Image Number 11: The Purple Flower, Version 1

This purple flower was not meant for success. I can’t remember who took the picture (I think it was me), but I do remember that Kyle and I weren’t really trying and just burning time as we waited for it to get dark. Kyle found the picture in our files and saved it from digital death. He took it through Photoshop and managed to turn a good image into a great image. If you zoom in all the way, you can tell that it is extremely sharp, perhaps the sharpest picture we have ever taken. I added a couple of things in Photoshop (cropped it, and Dodge and Burned), but the vast majority of the work is Kyle’s. I really like it.

Image Number 12: The Red Berry, Version 1

Also a result of January 16, this image’s stay in our galleries might be very short, as I think it is over-sharpened and needs to be reworked. Kyle really liked it when we originally took the picture, so I decided to work on it in Photoshop. I think I worked a little too hard.

Well, that’s it. If I remember correctly, there are a few more images that I could have added, but they aren’t on my home iMac or MacBook Pro, so I can’t post them. I “took a break” from posting for a week, and think I might be better for it. I spent some time evaluating the future of CRDESIGNLAB and made some decisions about this blog’s, and my own, future. More of that is coming later.

Today in class, Mr. Skocko revealed that the Paint the World With Light project had been extended a month, and I am very happy that it has. To be honest, I don’t think a single one of our images has utilized our full potential as photographers and digital artists. This next month, and especially Spring Break, will be filled with light painting of a caliber not yet seen in the Mac Lab, and I intend for CRDESIGNLAB to be leading the way.

Also, Mr. Skocko has been pushing me towards creating light painting tutorials for Mac Lab students and students in the other two classrooms involved in the Paint the World With Light Project. I have been struggling with how I should make tutorials for light painting, and have decided that I will just do screen recordings using QuickTime X and see how it goes.

On another note, I have been thinking for a while that the Mac Lab light painters need to all work together on a massive light painting project somewhere away from school. At the same time, Mr. Skocko has been hinting (and saying) that I need to teach him how to light paint, and so I thought I would combine these two ideas. I was thinking that some day over Spring Break, anybody interesting in learning light painting and all those who already know how could meet somewhere of significance in the community and share skills and ideas while creating a masterpiece that would be the highlight of the Paint the World With Light book. Anyone would be invited. I think it is a good idea, but I want opinions.

If anyone has actually read this far, I must give you a round of applause. I have been writing this post for an hour and a half now, have typed out 1503 words, and am just now nearing the end of the rough draft.

There is just one last thing, a last-minute tech update.  The Mac Lab will be getting new 21.5 inch iMacs to replace the old white ones, so all of you who are sick of waiting ten minutes for a single small picture of a brick wall to Live Trace will soon have the best computers in the room.

So as not to make your eyes bleed any more, I will call this post completed. Hey, I haven’t posted anything in seven days, so I have a lot to say. This has to be some kind of record.

On March 20, 1945, the USS Midway, the largest warship in the world for ten years, became a part of the United States fleet. The first ship named after a World War II battle, The Midway was a terrifying military machine that ruled the open seas for 47 years. I have been aboard the museum-ship three times and two weeks ago Kyle and I decided to make it the star of our light painting.

We went downtown and photographed the city skyline and passing cars, and just before calling it a day, walked a mile down the street to Navy Pier. The long walk was well worth it, as we located a perfect spot to capture a beautiful angle of the Midway. I took about ten pictures before we finished for the day.

Over the past few days, I have been playing with the best of those images in Photoshop. I applied a new technique that allows me to extract massive amounts of detail from an image while at the same time creating a cool artistic effect. In total, I have taken the same image through Photoshop for the initial edits four times. Bad luck seemed be following me around, as the first three times, I “misplaced” the edited file. Well, the current version took less than five minutes to make, and I used skills I learned from Calvin Hollywood and Steven Moyer to create a wonderfully detailed and hopefully-mostly-color-correct image. I hope you like it.

On a different note, I spoke to Mr. Skocko at MLSS™ about joining the group of Mac Lab students working with video. I hope to join Danny Owens and Philip Behnam as they work towards mastering cinematography.

Update: Attention world!!!! We have moved. We are now our own site: crdesignlab.com!!!!

I opened Photoshop for the first time three years ago while searching for the best way to resize an image. In the span of three years, I have spent more time in Ps than any other Adobe application. I have practically lived with the app open for the past two months, because I am a light painter and the use of Photoshop is essential to light painting. Many times, Kyle and I have spoken about the importance and usefulness of Photoshop for editing purposes, and today I hope to show you why.

On January 16, Kyle and I went downtown and took a series of pictures outside Horton Plaza. The first featured image is the best of those images. The second featured image is that same picture after being taken through Photoshop. Many, many times. The difference is remarkable.

When we first saw that image on the camera screen after waiting 43 seconds for a few cars and a bus to drive by, we were ecstatic. We knew we had a masterpiece, but we were wrong. That image is not a masterpiece. This one is (or very close to it). And I can say that without a shadow of doubt. It is the best light painting we have ever made.  It blows everything else away.

I know you all are sick and tired of hearing about the 5 Stages of the Creative Process, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t mention how they apply to this image. First Insight: Mr. Skocko presented the class with the “Paint the World with Light” project early in the year. Saturation: I browsed light painting artwork from all corners of the internet, from YouTube to The Best of Ben Willmore. Incubation: Basically the car ride to downtown and our time taking pictures in the heart of Horton Plaza (which the security guards did not particularly like). Ah-Ha!: Out of options, we decided to turn towards the street and see what our cameras could do. The resulting awe stopped us in our tracks. We had discovered a whole new world of possibilities. Verification: After a month and a half, I can finally say that I have taken it the extra 10% and truly made this image a marvel. Yesterday, I took the previous version through Camera Raw one more time, at the advice of Fadi, and the power of Photoshop in all its glory blazed forth. Today, I improved upon what I did yesterday.

If I had not asked Fadi for his advice about the “final” version of the image, this would never have happened. I never would have experienced that final stage. I would have printed this picture, for the second time, without ever knowing its true potential. And so I thank you Fadi, for saying that it needed more color. And oh how you were right.

Also, if Mr. Skocko had not pressured me to wait a while before printing and see if anything more could be done, I would have had the last version in my hands without ever talking to Fadi.

So I leave you with this: never think you are done, because you will be proven wrong. When you think you are at the end, have worked your hardest, or are ready to call it done, push yourself even further, and you (and your work) will be better for it.

P.S.: While writing this post, I played with it in Photoshop a little more and made it even better. The total time spent in Ps on this image is probably around twelve hours. For those with lightning fast internet connections, here is the full version.

Well, Christopher and I are sitting at his house working on Mac Lab stuff, finalizing for print. He is currently working on “pool_02,” and I just put the finishing touches on the current “red_flower.” Both of which we plan on printing tomorrow during Mac Lab Saturday School™. We’ll probably spend the next half hour of so working, before we go out to light paint. As many of you have already read, on the Mac Lab Blog, this coming up Monday, March 1,  is the deadline for all light painting work to be considered for the “Paint The World With Light” book.

We plan on printing the newer version of this (which is much improved), tomorrow morning.

Do you think anything needs to be adjusted or changed? (Before it’s too late.)

I felt that I should give this new image its own post. I mentioned it at the end of the previous post, but didn’t go in depth. I took this photo last Friday near the USS Midway and the Star of India in Downtown. I took it into Photoshop today and am rather pleased with the result. Sometime this weekend I will add a Gaussian Blur to clear up the noise in the sky and the distortion in the streetlight.

Update: Passed the 3,500 hit and 400 comment marks last night. I never thought CRDESIGNLAB would be so successful.

I have been at my computer for five hours now, copying 30GB to two places and working on two images, one of which is done (for now).

As soon as I got home today, I began the long and arduous task of updating my files. Over the past six months, Kyle and I have accumulated just under 30GB of Mac Lab content, and have been trying our best to keep these 1,423 files synced across six computers. We upgraded to the 50GB version of DropBox, but that is limited by the speed of the internet connection and requires that the computer be turned on and logged into the specific account for an extended length of time, which is a problem because we are each only in the Mac Lab for one period a day. I have started storing all my files on my 1 terabyte external HDD, which I have lugged to school the past two days and have been trying to use to keep the computers undated, but DropBox just keeps messing things up. I have decided to suspend DropBox from the computers that are not updated and manually load the files onto them. Unfortunately, that all six computer needed updating, so the process has taken a while. So far, four are done. When I got home today, I updated my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and am letting my iMac sync up to the DropBox server. The iMac as school are also finished.

As soon as I got the file transfers started, I turned to Photoshop. A few posts ago, I said how I had spent an evening light painting with my lightsabers and that four good images were produced. Well,today I took one of those images back through Photoshop and attempted to improve upon the version that is on the Mac Lab Light Painting Gallery. One of the best features of this image is that you can see star lines in the background, and so I endeavored to improve this quality. I applied a “Deep Blue” “Photo Filter” set to 95% to the images and painstakingly masked everything expect the sky back in. Then I applied a “Cooling Filet (80)” set to 35% and copied the mask to that layer. The result was astounding. Where I once had a brownish-yellow haze, I now have a navy blue abyss streaked with starlight. It is a little hard to tell just how dramatic the change is from looking at the image to the left, but it makes all the difference. One of my favorite features of this image is the fact that I managed to capture the stars, and now to accent those with a clear blue sky, it completely makes the photo.  I also removed the hard light effect I added before, so now there is a smooth rather than harsh feel. The power of adjustment layers and the mask still astound me, even after three years.

After that, I played around with a similar image, but the masking was taking way too much time. I was forced to move on to more urgent tasks, like writing this post.

I officially dub Street 01 done for now. It goes back into my maze of a file system to await a day when I learn something new and can make it better.

Update: The power of QuickTime!!!!!!

To my disappointment, I learned on Friday that there was to be no Mac Lab Saturday School™ today. Too bad. Well, at least I got to sleep in. As I mentioned before, I plan to make this weekend very productive, so I wasted no time getting to work. From the time I woke up, which was a little before noon, I have been sitting in front of my 27 inch iMac, burning my retinas out. I started by unloading the pictures that Kyle, Cameron, and I took yesterday.

My friend and fellow Mac Lab student Cameron Rabell accompanied Kyle and I on our trip downtown yesterday, where we took about 40 pictures of the sites located between the Star of India and the USS Midway. As I unloaded the images early this afternoon, I was mildly disappointed. Most of them didn’t turn out, as we had been taking long exposures and the wind was blowing, so things (like boats) moved (and were therefore blurry). Also, we intended the images to be light paintings, but they turned out more like regular photographs, just at night. A couple did turn out interesting, and I took one into Photoshop today and edited it a little. The result is featured on this post.

After that, or maybe before, I can’t remember, I did the rounds on all my favorite sites, including the blogs of Christian Lim, Fadi George, and Philip Behnam. I decided to make a new “Inspiration” widget in the right sidebar, which I populate with some of the links from the Inspiration page. I also added links to the sites of five Mac Lab students to the Inspiration page and widget: Christian Lim, Danny Owens, Diana I, Fadi George, and Philip Behnam.

After that, I did a little bit of file management on my iMac and took an hour break for lunch. (CRDESIGNLAB has over 25GB of files so far. Luckily we have the 50GB version of DropBox and luckily my iMac has 1.55 terabytes of space left. At this rate, I will have to buy the 100GB upgrade for DropBox in a few weeks.)

When I returned, I saw that there was a comment by Mr. Skocko (ix625) on the post I wrote earlier today. I added that task to my mental queue.

Next, I went through the five images Kyle and I have ready to print and did some resizing and finishing. We hope to print these images next week, but that is what we have been saying for the last two weeks. Mr. Skocko, if you are reading this, please don’t let Kyle and I leave school on Monday without talking to you about printing. Basically, I completely remade the print layout for all five images so that they are the same width, have the same size borders, titles, and subtitles, and have text of the same color. I think the result is a good improvement. I still have to decide if one more of my images is good enough for print. Diana I. has told me on many occasions that she thinks the Shoe picture is one of my best, and I agree. It is has not been included in the original list of photos to be printed because Kyle doesn’t like it. Well, I will definitely try to print a copy for myself.

Then I went to work on the task Mr. Skocko gave in this comment and decided to submit the Bridge, Cars, Purple Building, and Street_02 images, for now. I resized them in Photoshop and put them in a dedicated folder in DropBox. By then, it was 6:00 pm and I had been working for six hours, with a one hour break. At that point, I started writing this post. Now it is almost 7:30, so I have been working for seven and a half hours with a one hour break. I would change this post’s title, but then it would have less meaning.

Some people might wonder why I would want to spend all this time working on stuff for the Mac Lab on a weekend? I type away right now, when I could be playing XBox or watching TV, or talking to friends, or at a movie, because for me, this is just as fun. I love the Mac Lab. I love working in the Mac Lab. I love working and seeing the beautiful result. I love trying to be brilliant. I sit here and type because for me, there is nothing I would rather be doing. For me, I wish it were 7 am not 7 pm, that way I would have more time to work. I wish I could work like this forever. I wish I could do more.

And so I restart my favorite iTunes playlist for the third time, and get back to work.

Update: I call it a day at 9:30, after eight and a half hours of work.

This post is a week overdue. The main topic of this post is actually what we did last weekend. Between working on Specialties for AP U.S. History and a pre-lab for AP Chemistry, Kyle and I found time to capture some new images as well as return to some old ones.

The New:

On Saturday, after we were done working on Specialties at the SDSU Library, Kyle and I got our camera gear and took a few photos around the campus. So far, we have only had time to edit one of them, which is the photo of a bridge seen to the left. During our numerous breaks from working, we also returned to an image we had taken on January 16, the same day we captured the Dip image that is on the Wall of Fame. Kyle really liked a building that was lit with purple spotlights, so I took a few photos of it. We messed with the best one in Photoshop, cropping it down and adjusting the contrast, among other things. The result will be printed in a few days (hopefully). That’s it for the new images, now on to the improved ones.

And the Improved:

Kyle and I went to Mac Lab Saturday School™ in order to catalog the contents of the camera cabinet, and ended up spending a lot of time working to get the Dip image ready to print. In the two and a half hours we spent going through multiple versions and generating over 4GB on new data, the image was greatly improved.We darkened it a great deal, as well as sharpened the foreground and cleaned up the sky a little with the patch tool. By the time it was printing, Kyle and I were sick of Photoshop, but had a new appreciation of its power. Finally, two copies were coming out of the Epson, one for Kyle and one for the Wall. We didn’t print one for me because I want to frame my copy, and I still need to buy a frame.

During our endless hours at the library, we also improved the Cars, Red Flower, and Seed Pod images, all of which we hope to print eventually. The Cars image, especially, was completely reworked and the result is spectacular when compared to the original. As for the other two, they underwent minor corrections and both are better for it.

Last weekend, we got a lot of work done, and I hope to do the same this weekend.