Small Things to make a better pic!

[aaronperry 0]

*** can this be moved to tutorial section***

Small Things to make a better pic!

       A brief tutorial to help add a little bit more to ur pic.

Welcome to a small tutorial by me, to just show you how to add small things to your picture to increase its realism and general appeal.

I will be using this as my basic image, This is an unedited picture straight from my simcity4 deluxe, experience. I have very few major mods and i have a large plug-in directory, so u will need some experience with the stex. the main purpose with this tutorial is to show you how paint, photo-shop or other programs can help change ur image with out loosing the effect your trying to give. i don't use photo shop, i have used Arcsoft PhotoImpression3, i find it easier to use even tho i have large knowledge of photo shop. So here's the basic image.

As you can see this image has many flaws. so ill make a list.

1). Construction site. At the rear its very square. using the clone tool, copy grass from the surrounding squares and brake the squareness

2). Small Shop, center bottom left  extend car park using clone tool.

3).Larger Shop center bottom more left.  theatre, extend driveways to the road using clone tool.

4).Far left open grass areas, remove road pavements. using clone tool - clone the grass right up to the road to make it more 'poorer looking'

5). Add cars using clone tool from car parks then crop away car park texture.

6). on undeveloped sites. clone grass. (other textures could be used).

7). on roof tops of large french yellow buildings - using clone tool create one large building by removing visible rooftop markings. keep cloning till realism achieved.

. on roof tops of large french yellow buildings - using clone tool create one large building by removing visible rooftop markings. keep cloning till realism achieved.

9). to the right of the yellow french buildings, the small corner shop (post-office) remove odd coloured texture by cloning street textures.

10). south of the post office, remove odd pavement textures by cloning textures from the plaza's

11).Right top, left of car showroom and north of petrol station, removed odd textures from roadside.

12).Far right mid height. french looking buildings join roofing, using clone tool.

13).Far right mid hieght plaza. remove excessive lights by using clone tool to clone light and shadowed textures.

14).London looking plasma buildings, merged using clone tool. take 5 pixel crop and paste again to stretch buildings parameters. use clone tool to merge roofing, continue cloning until realism reached.

15).Football stadia car park- merge car-parking textures. clone more cars into car park.

16). right of roundabout -

                                 Stretch driveways to street.

                                                        Merge two buildings together using clone and crop combinations.

                                   Delete no road icon my cloning surrounding textures.

                                    Roundabout - change path textures by cloning. from white to red/pink.

                                     Southwest of roundabout, using clone and crop add cars to carpark and merge two lots by carparks by cloning the textures.

                                       General area around round about using clone to change high wealth grass to standard, small patches changed x13.

So generally changing the appearance of the pic by changing small pixels to make the lots/textures and theme look different.

To see these changes easier i have a small two pic slide show, showing before and after. each pic stays on for 2 seconds,

Next we can play with the sketch of the image, by blurring, sharpening, lighting, highlighting, darkening, smoothing and adding text.

I have taken the edited image and sharpened.

I have taken the image and darkened, and then automatically picked the highlighted spots. this is only available on Arcsoft Photo-Impression Sorry.

And this is my final image!

Feel free to rate, or even to edit the original picture. Please tell me if u have found this tutorial useful.

[112233 1]

Awesome, unfortuantly my adobe photoshop corrupted (I have no idea how) I am to lazy to find the disk too.

[aaronperry 0]

Arcsoft Photo-impression is free and easy to use and requires no registration. wow i should get paid to do this...

[112233 1]

where can i get it?

[aaronperry 0]

http://www.arcsoft.com/products/photoimpression/ i have an older version which was free software with my webcam.

http://www.arcsoft.com/support/downloads/downloadview.asp?downloadid=284 free trail can be found here

[plasticboy 36]

Just a note for those who use Photoshop. To achieve the washed out effect, you don't even need any special plugins. A combination of different Color Balance settings, White Balance, and Dodge tool will do the job. Remember, you don't want to screw up your original image(especially if you've already saved the changes you applied to the image!), so use masks("Layer>Add Layer Mask>Hide all" function).

[aaronperry 0]

plasticboy How do u clone in photoshop?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

You can either duplicate the layer, erase stuff, and then move it around, or you can use the healing brush tool, or you can use the clone stamp tool.  Each of those is better for different situations.

[plasticboy 36]

Originally posted by: Jasoncw You can either duplicate the layer, erase stuff, and then move it around, or you can use the healing brush tool, or you can use the clone stamp tool.  Each of those is better for different situations.quote>

...Patch tool is also a very good tool to use for large selected areas.

[soldyne 111]

you certainly have great skills in photo editiing, although, I don't think this is for me. I prefer to show my city in my CJ exactly the way it is in the game. thats just me though. good tutorial though.

would you like to submit this as a tutorial for the omnibus?  as a Simtropolis Help Squad member I can bring it up as a possible submission with your permission.  give me a PM if you decide anything.

[Porter 68]

Same here soldyne, but I do like to use photoshop for that added wow effect... diffusion of glow, photo grain, snow effect, rain effect, motion blur.... stuff like that. It really just make the pic just pop out at you.

But, thanks for the ideas Aaron!

[The_sanderson 6]

I don

[aaronperry 0]

i spend around 20 mins making sure everything looks perfect. normally i go all over my image checking everthing and doing things to make my image more realistic and less squarey. i hope this helps

[plasticboy 36]

Originally posted by: aaronperry i spend around 20 mins making sure everything looks perfect. normally i go all over my image checking everthing and doing things to make my image more realistic and less squarey. i hope this helpsquote>

Impressive. I spend on average 6 to 8 hours working on each of my journal entries plus 2 hours on fine-tunning and fixing all the little problems that occur on the final rendering. In the end I end up with a 100+ layers most of which should be merged together in order to speed up the process and free up some memory on my computer.

The screenshot below illustrates the work in progress on just one of such files that contains 248 layers and occupies roughly 200mb on my hardrive.

[aaronperry 0]

omg wow well yer i wouldn't advise that amoutn of layers!!! lol good to see im not the only one that cares!!!

[The_sanderson 6]

Now,i test the editing with darkroom.I don