Lighting effects can add color, texture and control where the eye looks in an image.
The top is the source image. The bottom is the same image with lighting effects applied.
Built into Photoshop is a very capable lighting effect generator. This is particularly useful when you need to convert a stock footage image into a background plate for a green-screen key, then match it to the lighting needed for your story. Here are two tutorials on how this works.
NOTE: Background plates are still images, used behind green-screen keys, to give the actors an environment to act in. As long as the camera doesn’t more, these can be completely believable. Hollywood has used these for years.
Written by Colin Smith, for Photoshop Cafe, these two tutorials illustrate how to use Lighting Effects to simulate real lighting. The first adds colored gels in Photoshop and the second re-lights a scene and adds texture.
Not all effects require computers – these can all be created in-camera.
(Image courtesy DIYPhotography.net.)
There are plenty of ways to edit your videos and enhance them in post. But, there are also many tricks that help you do it in-camera. In this video, Jakob Owens of The Buff Nerds shares five simple ways that will let you add interesting effects to your videos as you film them.
Jakob uses these techniques for music videos, but you’ll find them handy for other types of video work as well.
Split Diopter
Prisms
Hollywood Black Magic filter
Kaleidoscope filter
Wine Glass
Here’s the link to the full tutorial, along with videos and explanations, from DIYPhotography.net.
Earth invaded! Jets vs. Dinosaurs. What’s not to like?
(Image courtesy of Pexels.com.)
Maxon and Red Giant have teamed up to create a new visual effects tutorial on how to create an alien invasion. And, it wouldn’t be Red Giant if there wasn’t a twist. This invasion features dinosaurs..!
Inspired by the 1996 hit movie Independence Day, Seth Worley took on the challenge of replicating the invasion, sans the octopus-like aliens from the film, opting instead for flying dinosaurs. Seth used Cinema 4D to create the short film’s supervillains and tools from Red Giant Complete to incorporate Independence Day-style visual effects. In the YouTube tutorial out now, Seth showcases how to work with lens distortion, camera tracking, 3D animation, color correction, compositing and much more to create the larger-than-life effects.
According to Red Giant, the full set of tools used includes:
Maxon Cinema 4D: Cinema 4D is an Academy Sci-Tech Award-winning professional 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software solution. Its powerful and flexible toolset makes 3D workflows more accessible for design professionals.
VFX Lens Distortion Matcher: A tool that makes it incredibly easy to undistort footage from any lens so that elements can be composited into a shot. Even if the kind of lens is unknown – wide angle, GoPro, fisheye, etc. – Lens Distortion Matcher can figure it out instantly.
VFX Supercomp: Supercomp is a compositing environment that makes it easy to create complex, seamless composites. In Supercomp, light and atmospheric effects interact with all layers and elements of a scene in a far more natural way, and with far less pre-composing in After Effects than ever before.
Trapcode Tao: With tools to generate complex procedural 3D geometries using built-in auto paths, mask shapes, and the motion from 3D lights, Trapcode Tao brings new depth to motion graphics projects.
VFX Optical Glow: A blazing fast, drop-dead gorgeous, photo-realistic glow effect for After Effects and Premiere Pro, Optical Glow makes adding picture-perfect glow effects to projects incredibly simple.
Red Giant Universe: Red Giant’s collection of GPU-accelerated video effects and transitions plugins for motion graphics artists and editors, Universe boasts over 85 tools supported across eight host-applications.
Magic Bullet Colorista IV: Magic Bullet Colorista IV provides professional color correction for filmmakers, turning Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects into a high-speed professional color grading environment.
Effects don’t always need computers to be effective.
Image courtesy of MotionArray.com.
This article first appeared in MotionArray.com. This is an excerpt.
Special effects have come a long way since the black and white films of yesteryear. Nevertheless, there’s still a handful of techniques pioneered over a century ago that are still alive and well in Hollywood today.
Forced Perspective. This is an optical illusion used to make an object or a character appear larger, smaller, closer, or further away than it actually is. It’s a technique that’s been used since the days of Charlie Chaplin, all the way up until today, playing an especially pivotal role in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Rotoscoping. Over the last two decades, the art form has advanced to ‘interpolated rotoscoping,’ a digital process that uses computer graphics and vector keyframes to create animation instead.
Dolly Zoom. The dolly zoom (a.k.a. the Vertigo effect) is an iconic cinematic technique. The vertigo effect is achieved by zooming the camera lens in, while simultaneously drawing the camera back in the opposite direction on a dolly—or vice versa.
Miniature (Tilt Shift) Effect. Simply speaking, miniature effect refers to any artificial sets or models that feature in a film. With the advent of CGI, the miniature effect has slowly but surely been working its way onto the special effect endangered list in recent years. But it’s still far from extinct.
Matte Painting. In a nutshell, this is where you paint part or all of a landscape you aren’t able to film because a) it doesn’t exist, or b) you don’t have the budget to create it.
Here’s the link to the full article, including links and illustrations.
Please rate the helpfulness of this tip.
Click on a star to rate it!
https://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpg00Larry Jordanhttps://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpgLarry Jordan2020-07-15 01:30:002020-07-15 01:30:00Tip #847: 5 “Old School” Effects That Still Work
This guide is for absolute beginners who are trying to find a career that compliments their passion for film, technology, design, coding and digital art. You are the type of person who knows that finance and medicine really isn’t your thing. You also know you never want to wear a suit to work either. However, you need some help getting started. It’s also a great guide to share with your parents and guardians who are trying to understand what the hell you are rambling on about, and why you are so excited.
What you will learn in this guide:
An overview of the Visual Effects industry
The most common jobs in the industry
How much you could earn as a visual effects artist
How to start learning visual effects
How to select the best school in your area
The best free and professional software to learn
Essential communities and blogs to start following
Top companies that employ visual effects artists
Essential reading for visual effects artists
Advice on how to get started with your own projects
Here’s the link to learn more, as well as a variety of links.
These are by far the best tools you can start with today without waiting.
Sculptris Artist: Barry Croucher
Here’s a list, published by TheRookies.co, a community for digital artists, of free VFX software. “These days there are plenty of free software licenses out there for you to play with. Most software companies offer educational licenses for their professional suite of tools, but nothing beats free. These are by far the best tools you can start with today without waiting.”
Blender. Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Fusion 16. Now it’s possible to bring feature film quality visual effects and motion graphics to any production! Whether you’re working on a Hollywood blockbuster, episodic television show, national commercial or independent film, Fusion gives you the power to create photorealistic visual effects, stunning motion graphics and incredible title sequences that completely immerse your audience. Best of all, it’s now part of DaVinci Resolve so you can switch from editing, color or audio to visual effects and motion graphics with a single click!
Houdini Apprentice. Houdini Apprentice is a free version of Houdini FX which can be used by students, artists and hobbyists to create personal non-commercial projects. With Houdini Apprentice, you have access to virtually all of the features of the award-winning Houdini FX to develop your skills and work on personal projects. Apprentice lets you save to disk and render out with a word mark.
Foundry Nuke(Non-Commercial). With Nuke Non-commercial, you get access to free, non-watermarked versions of Nuke, NukeX and even top-of-the-line Nuke Studio for as long as you like, so you can learn, explore and have fun on your own schedule. If you want to learn to composite, edit and finish with industry-leading tools used on blockbuster movies, Nuke Non-commercial is what you’ve been waiting for. You can work on personal projects, update your skills, experiment, research or just play around.
Sculptris. A fun and engaging way to start off your digital sculpting journey! If you’re new to the world of digital sculpting, Sculptris is the ideal ground on which to get started. If on the other hand you’re experienced in CG, we offer you ZBrush. With our award-winning software, ZBrush, released more than a decade ago, Pixologic, makers of ZBrush and Sculptris, has become recognized for bringing ground-breaking innovations into the world of digital art.
TheRookies.co – a community for non-professional digital artists.
The Rookies website logo.
Founded in 2010, TheRookies.co is a community for non-professional digital artists. A place for artists with a passion for film, games, animation, immersive media, archviz, motion graphics, product design and other creative industries.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a hobbyist, student, self-taught or even wanting to change careers. All that matters is you want to become a better artist, learn new skills and be surrounded by people on the same journey as you.
I enjoyed browsing the site, there are hundreds of examples of art across a wide range of skill sets – each showing finished results and how they got there.
They also offer a variety of projects and contests to reward skilled work.
Please rate the helpfulness of this tip.
Click on a star to rate it!
https://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpg00Larry Jordanhttps://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpgLarry Jordan2020-07-08 01:30:002020-07-08 01:30:00Tip #833: More About TheRookies.co
Application icons are easy to change – once you know where they are stored.
The old icons (top) and revised icons (bottom).
If you are one of the many, many people offended by Adobe’s bland – and darn-near-impossible-to-distinguish – application icons, Jack Roberts has written a step-by-step tutorial on how to change the application icons back to something more useful.
NOTE: This technique allows you to change these icons to ANYTHING you want – so feel free to let your creativity run amok.
I’d copy the steps here, but his tutorial is clear, well-written and clearly illustrated.
Image Capture is fast, secure, flexible… and free!
In my weekly newsletter, last week, I illustrated a process to quickly and securely transfer photos or video from an iPhone to a Mac using Image Capture.
While many of us use AirDrop, Apple’s free utility, Image Capture, provides the following benefits:
Faster file transfers due to a direct, wired connection
More secure transfers. There is no risk you’ll send the wrong image to the wrong person.
Easier selection of multiple images
Directly transfer files to a specific folder, without transferring images to the Downloads folder first
Immediately delete media from your iPhone once it has transferred to your computer
I’ve used AirDrop, Preview and 3rd-party utilities. Image Capture beats all of them.
https://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpg00Larry Jordanhttps://www.theinsidetips.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tips-Logo-700x150.jpgLarry Jordan2020-07-01 01:30:002020-07-01 01:30:00Tip #810: Quickly Transfer iPhone Media
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
Essential Website Cookies
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refuseing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
Google Analytics Cookies
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
Other external services
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
Other cookies
The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:
Privacy Policy
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.
