Earlier this week Peter offered up his work for us to use in our 3D Invigorator gallery section. He is the Company Director for After Hours Creative, a small design studio in England that specializes in high impact graphics.

(Above) “Created for an individual looking for a totally unique card design. We decided to create a romantic feel to the word “Love” with just colours, textures and a small selection of well placed images. The combination of 3D text created in 3D Invigorator, textures in Texture Anarchy and images of small roses achieved the look and feel perfectly.” -Saunders

(Above) “Our slogan for this design was “Don’t leave your graphics out in the cold this winter.” The weather was freezing, the economy wasn’t great but we wanted to let businesses know this didn’t mean they had to abandon their budgets for design work. When it came to creating imagery for this slogan we decided to warm up 3D Invigorator. We manipulated each letter of the word “Graphics” then added it to a wintery scene. Texture Anarchy enabled us to create the two textures needed for the letters, we then added snow and a few lonely branches creating a design that both inspired and kept us busy and warm!!” -Saunders

To see more 3D Invigorator gallery images visit here.

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An interesting aspect to Beauty Box Video is that it’s difficult to get people to admit they are using it. A LOT of production companies have bought and loved the software but they’re a little shy about singing its praises publicly. Their actor and actress clients aren’t too keen about wanting fans to know they used software to make them (more) beautiful.

This wasn’t a problem for the subjects of Aaron’s production for the Kings. It’s a behind the scenes video of the photo shoot of the LA King’s Ice Girls calendar! Some very beautiful girls who you wouldn’t think would need much retouching.

(Click on the image above to be taken to the King’s site and see the video.)

However, no situation is perfect.

Aaron and crew were shooting a photo shoot, which was set up to be ideal for photos, not necessarily for video. Most of the footage was shot with a Canon XL H1S, but a Canon DSLR was used for interviews, and a GoPro HD camera was used for underwater shots. All these cameras produce great footage, but it’s all HD. If makeup and lighting aren’t set up for video, HD is not always kind to the talent’s skin texture. This is why Beauty Box has been so popular and why Aaron really needed it on this shoot. He was nice enough to answer a few questions about the production:

AnarchyJim: Beautiful models, professional photo shoot, makeup… you wouldn’t expect a lot of  retouching would be necessary. How did Beauty Box help you out?

Aaron Brenner: The girls looked beautiful, but the lighting conditions and overall shoot were geared toward the still photographs for the calendar. Beauty Box helped us clean up some of the shadows and skin tones as well as minor blemishes here and there. In the past, we had taken our footage, separated the highlights from the rest of the image and applied a diffusion filter to affect just the skin tones. Beauty Box cut our post-production time in half.

AnarchyJim: What were some of the challenges you ran into shooting it?

AB: Overall, we shot 8 hours worth of footage, using 3 different cameras and resolutions. The second you’re working with multiple cameras, formats and resolutions, you’re going to face challenges. Mixing 720 60p footage with 1080 60i and HDV is a huge challenge. We worked in Apple’s ProRes codec and Beauty Box didn’t slow down for any shot.

AnarchyJim: How hard was it to get good results from Beauty Box?

AB: Click. Click. Boom. Manually set the skin tone to match, or auto analyze the frame, then let her render. It’s pretty impressive. We also ran almost every shot through the 3-way color corrector built into FCP. So Beauty Box fit into our workflow nicely.

AnarchyJim: Where is the video being shown?

AB: Our finished product is shown on our telecast, on our website at lakings.com/calendar and in our arena on our brand new HD scoreboard. Overall, we are producing 15 3-minute videos. The first video is the behind-the-scenes feature you saw. The next 14 videos are profiles on each girl. Those are all currently being edited.

AnarchyJim: What other kind of work are you doing for the Kings?

AB: For the Kings, we handle everything from post-game interviews, behind the scenes features and bikini calendar photo shoots. We work around the clock to deliver up-to-the-minute Kings video to our fans on our telecast, in arena and online.

AnarchyJim: So far the Kings are doing pretty well. Any plans to ‘beautify’ the hockey players if they make it to the Stanley Cup?

AB: We don’t have any plans… yet.

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The example above shows one before/after image with only a little skin correction needed. The example below shows a more extreme example of skin smoothing. The plugin is great for both kinds of situations because it always gives a natural look.

You can still purchase Beauty Box Photo for it’s introductory rate of $79 until July 31, 2010.

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(Both images © William Branson III)

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It’s fascinating — and maybe a bit disturbing — to realize that mundane scenes in TV shows are now regularly treated as visual effects events. Digital Anarchy first developed Primatte Chromakey, our Adobe Photoshop plugin for green screen masking, in mid-2005. At the time, we had to spend a lot of time simply explaining to photographers what ‘green screen’ meant. Five years later, green screen is a recognized entity with information accessible on non-pro sites like ehow.com. The convergence continues!

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1: My Illustrator files won’t import, why?

Save Illustrator Files as Invigorator 10 files. Invigorator can’t read vector files saved out in newer Illustrator formats. So save your files as Illustrator 10 files to ensure they’ll come into 3D Invigorator. See the tutorial on Illustrator files:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t6

2: My complex Illustrator file isn’t coming in correctly. Why?

Divide and Conquer: For complex objects, save out paths separately and import them separately. With lots of paths, Invigorator may not always figure out what you want to do. So breaking your logo (or art) into it’s component pieces and importing each of them will ensure you get exactly what you want.

3: How do I create a hole in my object?

Use Illustrator Groups to create holes. Group one path within another and 3D Invigorator will interpret the inner path as a hole. See the video tutorial on Illustrator files for more info:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t6

4: I’ve created an object with several materials on it. Can I save all the materials together?

Save Object Styles so you can use them on other objects. Go to the Object Styles Swatches and select Save Object Style from the dropdown menu. It’s pretty easy. Take a look at our tutorial on materials for a bit longer explanation:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t7

5: My text/logo looks ‘blocky’, and curves aren’t smooth. What’s wrong?

Use object Smoothness to get better looking Objects. Most computers/graphics cards can handle having Object Smoothness cranked all the way up to 100. If you have a lot of objects, Invigorator may slow down a bit, but usually you won’t see a performance hit. Check out this video tutorial for a bit more info on Smoothness and 3D objects:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t3

6: I’ve created a complex logo in 3D Invigorator, how can I reuse it? / Can 3D Invigorator be used as a Smart Filter?

You can save anything you create in 3D Invigorator by going to File>Save Scene As… However, we recommend using Invigorator as a Smart Filter. It’ll allow you to make changes at any time, even a year later. This is a big deal because if you spend the time creating a logo in 3D Invigorator, if you just apply it as a regular filter… all that setup is lost. Invigorator renders out the logo to Photoshop layer, but the 3D geometry is not saved. So it’s important to either save the scene or use 3D Invigorator as a Smart Filter so you don’t have to re-setup the logo or artwork next time you want to use it. Here’s a tutorial on using Smart Filters:

http://digitalanarchy.com/primatte/tutes.html#t5

7: How do I use multiple materials on one object?

Using the Profile Viewer you can drag and drop materials on different parts of the object. The Profile Viewer shows the front, back, and sides of the object.  You can drag materials on to the front and back. The sides can be divided up into many different parts and each part can have a different material. Here’s a tutorial on the Profile Viewer:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t5

8: How do I create textures like brick or concrete?

Use jpegs to create custom texture materials. Take a picture of Concrete and use it as the Color map and the Bump map. Click on the picture icons next to the Color parameter and the Bump parameter in the Material Editor. This will allow you to select and load the jpeg image into your material. Check out this tutorial on texture maps:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t8

9: How do I make lighting adjustments?

Use the Light Editor to move lights or add them. You can also click on the Light icon at the top of the 3D Invigorator UI.

9 1/2: What’s the difference between Photoshop 3D capabilities and 3D Invigorator?

This is 9 1/2 because the question is really about Photoshop. There are lots of differences, but the main one is that 3D Invigorator is designed specifically for create 3D text and logos. So it’s much faster and easier to create high quality 3D logos with 3D Invigorator. We have a video tutorial that shows you a complete comparison between Photoshop’s 3D and 3D Invigorator. It’s here:

http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t1

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Well… apparently not all paper backgrounds are made equal!

I don’t remember who made the paper background we initially tested. But it was awful. Very reflective and prone to hot spots. We figured all paper would have the same problems. After listening to a talk by another company that does greenscreen software, I decided to revisit this and give Savage Paper’s ‘tech green #46′ a try.

So how’d it fare vs. the foam materail we’ve been recommending since day 1?

Excellent! I was very impressed with how evenly it lit. The paper has a very flat finish on it, meaning very little reflection and easy lighting. Of course, we lit everything with two big softboxes, so that helped I’m sure.

I’m going back on my opinion that paper won’t work for greenscreen backgrounds, and give a solid recommendation to the Savage #46 paper. I DO NOT think that all paper will work as well. As in our initial test, some papers are glossy and not suitable for chromakey. Also, Savage just released vinyl backgrounds that come in green and I’m highly skeptical that it’ll work for greenscreen. It’s got a pretty glossy finish, which is usually a disaster for chromakey.

We still recommend the foam material as well. But I think the Savage paper is on par with it, except in terms of reusability. I think the foam material generally works well, it’s easy to transport, and you can easily clean and reuse it.

For full length in a studio, I would give the nod to the paper. I think you’re likely to get a little less spill around the feet, but I don’t think the difference is that significant. You can take a look at the results with the two materials:

There are other materials out there… paint, canvas, etc. The important part with any material is a very flat finish on the surface. If you have that, it should work fine as a greenscreen.

If there are any other manufacturers of greenscreen backgrounds reading this that would like our recommendation on their product, please feel free to contact us to send us a sample. However, right now, the only materials we’re recommending is the Savage #46 paper and foam-backed material made by velcro.

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A pretty standard support email that we receive is from folks who can’t find their serial numbers and need that information resent. Super simple. Occasionally I receive a support email from someone who we can’t find in our serial number database. This generally turns out to be a bogus request but every once in a while, I am positive that the customer is sincere and we bend the rules.

In John’s case, he had bought version 2.0 of our popular Primatte Chromakey, an Adobe Photoshop plugin that masks out greenscreen photographs. He contacted us asking for a resend of the product and serial number, but I couldn’t find him in our Primatte database. He was so cool and patient and sincere that after some back & forth, I decided the mistake was on Digital Anarchy and issued him a new Primatte serial number.

This was his response:

I asked John a little about himself. He is is a photographer who shoots primarily portrait & portfolio without the benefit of a studio. He uses our Primatte software because “I can set-up stands and a green screen background at a park or other location and then using Primatte, I can put the model anywhere in the world or use any background that I want without having to transport everything with me.”

Thanks John Gunmann. You’re a great memory to end the year with, and exactly why I work here at Digital Anarchy. ;)

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This is one of the reasons we hand fill orders. It’s not uncommon for someone to forget he already owns a product. It’s also not uncommon for someone to think she bought the product when really she only downloaded the demo. This was the basis of two different support calls last week.

(By the way, I feel this theory should extend to cheesecake. I should be able taste its sweetness just thinking about eating cake, and therefore save myself the calories.)

Royalty-free cheesecake served up from www.freefoto.com. Cool stuff on that site.

I emailed the customer and he said that he couldn’t remember if he owned the product and was under a deadline. I resent his product info and refunded the new purchase.

From Roger, the customer mentioned:

Many software companies provide automatic downloads for their products. You put in your credit card digits and in maybe two minutes, the product is downloading to your desktop. Digital Anarchy is one of those companies that has a delay in sending out products. Sometimes that delay is only a half hour, while other times you have to wait a couple of hours until our office is open.

The downside is that you may need to wait a few hours to get your goodies. The upside is that we comb through orders along with other emails to make sure your service goes smoothly and you are only paying for what you really need. You can read more about our support policies here.

regards -Debbie

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Mark said, “Thanks for the cool tool. After only a few minutes of playing around with it, I decided to buy it (original and toonit versions of one picture attached). Love it!”

Mark’s ToonIt image:

When I asked him if the photo was of his band, Mark wrote back, “The folks in the photo are me, me, me and me – I was playing around with multiple exposures with my digital camera and Photoshop (when I SHOULD have been practicing the banjo – grin). Definitely not in a band – still a rank amateur. I just thought that photo would cartoon well.”

Mark’s original composite:

You can find more about Mark at www.professional-geek.com.  Looks like he’s quite busy outside of his music and art.  I love meeting intelligent tech professionals who also have a creative side and a sense of humor. It’s the best part of my job at Digital Anarchy!

regards -Debbie

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Let’s talk about how. Here’s the original image for Gomediazine.com:

Here’s some 3D text I whipped up in 3D Invigorator in about 15 minutes:

This isn’t a perfect recreation. I didn’t spend that much time on it. And, of course, if you want the explosion and lightning, you’ll need to go through the gomediazine.com tutorial as they teach you how to do that. I’m just here for the 3D text. I wanted to show some of the possibilities of 3D Invig and on a basic level how I created it.

In the 3D Invigorator tutorial sections, the basic video tutorials go over how to move and rotate text and lights, so I recommend checking those out. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about positioning the text as I have here.

The debris around the text is a little trickier. 3D Invigorator doesn’t really have a great way of generating random polygons for this purpose. So… enter Adobe Illustrator.

I used Illustrator to create some debris. Just by going in and scribbling with the wacom pen and creating some squares and triangles. Here are a couple debris files:

Since 3D Invigorator can accept Illustrator Files (you need to save them as Illustrator CS files though!), I just imported these, rotated and scaled them a bit and instant debris! Obviously with a little more effort you can create just as much debris as the original had.

So that’s a quick way of adding random elements to the text you create in 3D Invigorator. There’s no limit to the number of objects that can be added to an Invigorator scene. So feel free to whip up all sorts of cool shapes in Illustrator to accentuate your text.

HOT TIP: You can save your scenes! Go to File>Save Scene… If you’ve created a really big setup and spent a lot of time working on it, make sure you save it. If Photoshop crashes or the power goes out you’ll (as usual) lose everything if it’s not saved.

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We have also added a movie that talks between working in 3D Invigorator’s environment vs. making use of Photoshop’s new 3D capabilities? The difference is pretty vast and we explain it all in this video tutorial.

You can read a terrific review of the product on one of our favorite editorial venues, Digital Arts magazine. This review was posted in April 2009, just after the product was released, and it’s a great read. Neil Bennett gave the plugin 4.5/5 stars and a DigitalArts Best Buy rating. Thanks Neil!

An excerpt: “We were impressed by the quality of this plug-ins rendering – it’s not photorealistic, but it’s more than enough for most illustration projects and it can mimic a number of different lens types… 3D Invigorator really is a 3D tool for digital artists and illustrators who’ve never looked beyond Photoshop’s layers for compositing due to 3D’s complexity and painful initial curve, as it’s powerful and accessible and is capable of producing great results.

Another great review was podcast on Layers TV, episode #85, by Corey Barker. He’s the resident 3D slash Photoshop guru over at Layers magazine, and Corey talked about 3D Invigorator in May 2009, shortly after a preview at the NAB show in Vegas.

An excerpt: “One thing that I do like a lot about this particular plugin is how quick it is in Real Time… So I know exactly what is being placed and how it is being applied…. It looks like a nicely rendered object, and look how quick that was. One simple Illustrator object, brought into the Invigorator, applied a property, just made a couple of adjustments, and there we go.”

So.. whatcha waiting for? Download the free trial of 3D Invigorator from our Digital Anarchy demos page.

Enjoy this sunny Saturday! -debbie

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I always enjoy reading about people’s hardware and software choices and moreso about their creative decisions. But what I really enjoyed about this article was the final interview question asked of Rivera.

Note: This movie still has been reposted from Studiodaily.com.

“Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers?
A: Find your inner freak. If you’re just trying to get the best lighting or camera movement, you’re competing with thousands of other people. There are so many movies that get made that the only way to stand out is be different. Be your own bizarre self.”

Guess this is the most challenging aspect of being an artist of any kind, digital or not. It’s easy enough to learn tools and techniques. It’s more difficult to decide what to do with them creatively. I’ve been hanging with Digital Anarchy for seven years now, and am still amazed and delighted by the new and original uses for our Adobe Photoshop plugins that folks come up with. You can see some of these graphics here in our online Gallery.

regards -Debbie

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For instance, this past week I was writing about a parameter in our ToonIt! Photo plugin. The control is called Lighter Type and the way to describe its Lighter1 option is to say that Lighter1 alters the ‘gamma’ of the source image. Well, I know that ‘gamma’ refers to colors but whew, I get completely lost after that.

Glad I’m not the only one. I googled ‘what is gamma’ and immediately came up with this Colormatters.com explanation:

“How do you define gamma? Gamma is one of the most difficult computer terms to define. Even experienced computer technicians have a difficult time understanding what it is. We will attempt to simplify it.”

Well that reassured me but the explanation was a little difficult to follow. Too hardware driven, talking a lot about monitors. I found the info on this Payton.com page more relevant:

“In video, computer graphics, and image processing, the gamma symbol represents a numerical parameter that describes the nonlinear relationship between pixel value and luminance (or what you might loosely call “intensity”). Having a good understanding of the theory and practice of gamma will enable you to get good results when you create, process and display pictures.”

And there you have it. So have a gamma good day! (Which I suppose means have a luminescent or intense day.)

Here’s the result with the ToonIt! defaults rendered out of Photoshop:

Here is the original photo:

The only post-plugin editing that I felt was necessary was airbrushing out the nose ring from the girl’s face. Sometimes you will have to make little edits just because a detail that looks fine in the original photo simply doesn’t translate into black outlines and color fields. If you have a nice source image to start with, then this will happen infrequently. Try it yourself with our free ToonIt Photo demo!

regards -Debbie

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Our president, Jim Tierney, had the disadvantage of working on this product release remotely… from Hawaii. Here are some of his hard-earned Maui test shots for Knoll Light Factory.

His original shot:

The Knoll-infused version:

Aperture is an Apple application and Mac-only. Normally we are a platform agnostic kinda company, but we feel Aperture is an important professional-level product to support. Plans for supporting Adobe’s Lightroom, which runs on Windows and Mac, are in the works for later this year.

Both Aperture and Lightroom are great apps for working with RAW files and managing large groups of photographs. We’re pretty excited about supporting our plugins in this environment because it is so powerful for digital professionals who are looking for more creative control with less workflow restrictions.

Read our full press release. You can download free demos of the Aperture plugins for ToonIt! Photo here and Knoll Light Factory here.

regards -Debbie

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Unfortunately, the ToonIt! manual took a week longer than the product release. It’s always the little stuff, like forgetting to plug in in the toaster, that trips me up. You can get the ToonIt! Photo manual from here. I apologize for the wait. Writing manuals is _almost as difficult as reading them.

The cartoon results for Molotov Cupcake.

Original image of an unamused cat.

For some holiday cheer, here are some photos that we had fun with during the manual writing process. The office cat didn’t appreciate the photo shoot, but we sure did. ;)

More toon added to the Cupcake kitten.

Less toon added.

As you can see, the amount of detail in your ToonIt! cartoon makes a difference for the final look & feel. Luckily, ToonIt! comes with effect and style choices that are easy and fast to use. This royalty-free photo is one of the samples you can download from our Demos page, so try out your cartooning ideas and have fun!

All the best -Debbie

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Which caused me to stumble upon one of my favorite artists in our Primatte Chromakey gallery. John Riley, Ph.D., is a physicist and associate professor who initially contacted Digital Anarchy about some graphics work for which he was using Primatte, an Adobe Photoshop plugin for blue/greenscreen masking.

John showed us the Virtual Reality work, otherwise known as VR, that he was preparing for a portion of the artifact collection of the National Museum of Costa Rica. We were wow’ed. John uses Primatte inside a Photoshop batch to pull multiple shots of the collection objects off a bluescreen. Then he composites those new images into object spin movies and panoramas

Since that time, John has expanded his already enviable talents into a VR consulting business, 4Pi-VR Media Solutions. If you want to know more about creating photographic virtual reality, he’s your guy and you can find that info here

To see John’s Costa Rica VR work, please visit the Digital Anarchy gallery.

regards -Debbie

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“Sixty years after Polaroid introduced its first instant camera, the company’s iconic film is disappearing from stores. Although Polaroid says the film should be available into 2009, this is the final month of its last production year. Eclipsed by digital photography, Polaroid’s white-bordered prints — and the anticipation they created as their ghostly images gradually came into view — will soon be things of the past.”

This discontinuation feels quite sad. Although I don’t use Polaroid anymore, I remember years back when my friends and I would take Polaroids of each other at parties and tape the photos to a window or sliding glass door. By the end of the evening, we’d have a timeline of the party and all of the silly and sweet things that had occurred.

hmm, and perhaps my statement multiplied by 1 or 3 million is why the instant film is being discontinued. Memories don’t always translate into dollars. Also, while Polariod is nostalgic to me and perhaps the generation above me, it’s not to someone in their teens or 20′s.

Seems to me that if Polaroid did some marketing and made that medium feel relevant, then it could still sell okay. But I guess they’re a big company and it’s just not worthwhile to their bottom line.

regards -Debbie

As I was working on the material for our launch, to keep myself amused late into the night, friends emailed me close-up photos of themselves. I would run a quick toon on the photo and sent the new image back. That was fun to do and a new word was born: ‘cartoodling’. It’s when you (ok, me) play around with a cartoon filter and just whittle and doodle the time away…

Below, my two late night helpers.

And remote support ;)

regards -Debbie

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