Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

Recently after scanning in some of my sketches I've been using the liquify tool in Photoshop to modify and test concepts for characters. While this technique may not be art 101 or considered as 'cheating' for traditional artists it's a great way to get quick character ideas from 1 basic sketch. I see it as a similar thing to using a basemesh or a Squirkle in Zbrush for some quick character concepts (sculpting and moving the original mesh).

I don't think Liquify needs much of a tutorial, the icons are self explanatory and you will find it under the filters menu (near the top). Alternatively if you want a shortcut for it --> Shift+Ctrl+x by default.

For this example I scanned in a sketch I did a while ago;


After doing some basic colouring for this an extremely rough blurred skin highlight and lowlight and a blue shadow layer, gaussian blurred and then flattened. I bulked the character out a bit and raised his nose, mouth and shrank his ear a little to help with the proportions.


Following on from this I tried a few more things, a bit more extreme but just to show the range of characters you can create. These were both done extremely quickly so things like the collar are still distorted but are just examples;




While I wouldn't recommend this for final work it's great to just get a few ideas going or work on expressions or proportions of characters. I'd personally recommend just sticking with the move brush for bulking out characters as the bloat or pucker tools can quickly get out of hand - use the reconstruct tool rather than the global reconstruct option to bring major distortions back. Worth giving a go anyway!

Some of the sights around Cobh (this place was the Titanic's final stop before embarking and crashing).


Below is a test HDR B+W Panorama. I used free stitching software Hugin to put it together (from 5 images). I am working on the full colour one at the moment but just wanted to test the software. Click to see an enlarged version.



Filters used: Circular Polariser, ND8 Grad + Neutral grey ND 8 Cokin filters

Just finally set up our printer/scanner. Scanned a couple of the most recent sketches I've done. Here they are;

Finally I did another little test before heading to the coast tomorrow (weather permitting) of the filters with the circular polariser. I am still getting quite a bit of lens flare which isn't too hard to take out of shot if needed but not really desired.

A quickly knocked up HDR is below, I've not taken any lens flare or screen marks out just to show the issues I am getting currently. They'll be sorted tomorrow though.

Finally got some of my shots taken last year printed (got a few from the year before printed as well). Mainly did this to check how they looked enlarged and I'm generally pleased with the outcome. I did have some ratio issues with my shots which caused some cropping issues (for the smaller prints I didn't mind as they were at a test size, unfortunately enlarged the one of Potsdamer Platz in 24x18 instead of 24x16 so there were some big cropping issues there (not shown on the photos taken of the prints).

By the way if anyone is interested in buying one of my prints feel free to contact me, drop me a message on here or similar.

The biggest challenge I encountered with the printing was looking for suitable frames. Most frames in retailers had only up to 10x8 or standard ratios, frames that required 12x10 or 24x16 were a little harder to find here although a local hardware store can provide them (as well as an Irish frame company online).

Also this week I bought a new filter for my Cokin Filter system, A ND8 (neutral gray). Using this along side the other ND8 Gradient as I'm wanting to get some long exposures near the coast over the next few months. Here is a test shot taken earlier with them (and a circular polariser attached).


Finally this week I looked back on an old digital painting I was working on (studying digital painting and faces) and worked a little on colours and balance with the image. Here's what I ended up with.