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This week, in tribute to the great Richard Biggs, we've got Dr. Franklin over at the

multi_pass. You should come play.

Also, I made a tutorial, and figured I would share.

Took this original cap:

And tipped it forward till I was happy with it (either 12 or 16 degrees clockwise, I can't remember), then cropped squarely:

All I wanted from this picture was Stephen's lovely face, because he had that great faraway lost look he got when he was having existential crises (and Franklin was the most interesting when he was having existential crises, as we well know).

The quality of the image was such that when I sharpened it, it got a little too grainy, too rough for my taste. So I zoomed way in and used the blur tool (the little raindrop thingy) in brushes ranging from 1px to 13px in size to smudge and soften Franklin's face inside the sharpened edges. I got this:

I made a couple duplicates of the blurred version, a couple of the grainy version, played with the opacities a little and found a version that was somewhere in between. Then merged!

Then I duplicated a couple times in screen and soft light, added a dark green exclusion layer, a light beige overlay layer in between those two, and played with the opacities till I had a color-corrected image I liked. I rendered some new lighting effects coming from the lower right, in an effort to highlight Stephen's cheekbones, forehead, craggy features, etc.

Got this:

I used the polygonal lasso to select out Stephen's face, which I copied and pasted over a gradient layer with a dark green in the upper left and a bright yellow in the lower right, matching my new lighting effects direction. Then I used a diagonal blinds brush (from

oxymoronassoc, IIRC) at about 30% opacity as an eraser, and erased some of the face-only layer over the gradient. That lent some highlights to the original image, and added some texture too. I stuck that back on over the original black background and merged again, and got this:

Now for the tricky part!

I built another horizontal gradient, running from a dark midnight blue on the left to a pale sage green on the right. I stuck it behind my merged Stephen, and then used a round eraser brush on ~30-40% opacity to erase the right half of Stephen's face -- to make it more transparent, rather, while not fully transparent. Then, when I played with the opacity of the Stephen layer over the gradient layer, the gradient showed through more prominently on the right side of Stephen's face, further emphasizing the lighting glow I was trying to create. Like so:

Used one of

quebelly's recent Times New Roman brushes in Overlay mode, and used a semi-transparent eraser to knock out some of the lower slashes where they overlapped Stephen's chin, to make them less bold:

Then drew some lines with the line tool and filled in some segments with dark wedges of red and green on Multiply, to create a skewed border effect:

And text! "find yourself" is in 9px at a spacing of +100, "did you" and "out there" are 11px at a spacing of 100, and the questionmark is 36px, all are Times New Roman, faux bold, faux italics, in Multiply, at varying degrees of opacity.

Wa-hah! Voila! Ta da! Other things!

Any questions?

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Come to

multi_pass and join us for the Week of Dr. Franklin. Thank you.