Neverside

lcd-orbs tutorial

Hi,

I'd really appreciate some help with the lcd-orbs-tutorial.
http://www.absolutecross.com/tutorials/photoshop/interfaces/lcd-orbs/

I've done the same tut over 5 times now, double checked the settings etc, and downloaded the example .psd. So I'm not one of those guys that post immediately when things aren't going well.

Ok, until step 3 I'm fine; got all the layers with their settings, but in step 3 something goes wrong. First of all, it's weird that the tut reads:

"After that, select the Paintbrush tool and in the Options bar, select the Airbrush icon."

The Paintbrush- and Airbrush tools are actually seperate buttons and the only way to select the Airbrush in my Phothoshop 6.0, is by directly selecting it; I can't select Airbrush in the Options bar of the Paintbrush; that option is just not there. But I guess the guy who created this tutorial used another version of Photoshop that probably has those brushes under the same button. I assume it's ok when I just directly select the Airbrush tool. If not, pls tell me otherwise.Now here it comes:

"Change the layer blending mode of this layer from Normal to Color Dodge, and lower the "Fill" (located under the opacity) to around 21%. Now using two soft brushes, size 200px and 100px, paint a bright area around the bottom half of the circle as shown in the example below. Looking smooth eh?"

Well, it's not looking that smooth in my case. It just looks like lighter paint in the original paint; everything but smooth. So a question here:

- I painted with the white color, is this correct?
- A 'soft' brush doesn't mean changing the 'pressure', right? I've just selected the black, soft looking brush dot as a brush and kept the pressure at 100%.
- The picture in the tutorial looks like the creator painted inside a smaller selection than the actual circle, but it's not mentioned in the tutorial. It just looks too clean and perfect to be done without another selection, but it could be just me.

The rest of the steps are fine, but the endresult is not good because of step 3. Here's a pic of the endresult where you can clearly see the Airbrush uglyness:

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated since I'd really like to understand what I'm doing wrong.

Regards,

Klaas
ps: I've attached the psd as well

well, one of the problems is also that your picture is humongously larger than RoboUK's. One thing you can do is to increase your brush size to a bit larger than your entire orb size (warning, this can slow down your ps significantly). Then, just click a few times in the lower area of your orb and it'll look pretty clean. Or you can just shrink your orb to a more manageable size and stick with the 200px brush. Also, RoboUK's color choice is less saturated than your picture, which is why when you choose color dodge it turns purplish, which I'm guessing you don't like. You can fix this a bit by selecting the original orb layer and hitting Ctrl+U, and tone down the saturation.

Oh, and yeah you had the right idea with the airbrush. Ps 6.0 and ps 7.0 has big leaps of changes.

___________________

http://www.daggerblack.com || I was Incarnate on TF

Thanks alot!!! This saturation suggestion really helped. It looks alot better now.

Well about the size: I just used 500 x 500 px, as in the tutorial. I didn't scale down before posting it here because I wanted people to see what I meant.

well, glad I helped anyhow Let's see your finished design when you're done.

___________________

http://www.daggerblack.com || I was Incarnate on TF

I remember that was the first LCD tutorial I had ever done, way back when Robouk posted it on his site the first time. It never did look like his, and I am glad it didn't.

I learned so much from his tutorials. Experimenting, changing things, etc. I would thank him if he were still around.

___________________

Happywebmasters.com Resident Photoshop Expert

I'm never a million miles away

___________________

- Robouk

Heya Rob

Just FYI (to anyone viewing this thread), since the time this thread was posted, I've since updated the tutorial to work correctly using Photoshop CS. I believe some of the confusion (at least from what I could tell from testing out the technique as much as I could myself) was due to the settings recommended in the tutorial being more accurate for reproducing the LCD Orb at the "size of the example" rather than the size recommended you set your document to (i.e. I tried out a test, doing the tutorial based on a document the size of the example graphics, and using the recommended settings, my result came out quite close to the tutorial's samples).

I rewrote the tutorial now with that in mind, adjusting the recommended values to emulate the effect at a larger document size. I made new example images when doing this, but made sure they kept the essence of Rob's original effect (which is the point of the tutorial anyhow hehe).

Enjoy the tutorial

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com