Laughing Lion Design

Recent Work: Dalai Lama Poster

This image was made for a poster. It’s a mixture of pixels and vectors, and a young and old buddhist monk. The older monk, is of course H.H. The Dalai Lama. It loses quite a bit at this size, as it was created as an A3 sized poster and I was very pleased with how it looked.

If you need some photo manipulation or image editing work done, please contact me.

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Two Free eBooks For Creative Folk

The Creative Group have a number of free ebooks on their site. Two that might be of interest for the creative crew out there are the “Books Smart”, with tips on how to put together a portfolio and “Creativity On A Dime”, with creativity boosters.

Creativity On A Dime
This guide features 20 cost-effective ways to help in-house design teams stay creatively focused and inspired. There are ideas for boosting team morale, creating a more stimulating work environment and keeping your personal spark alive.
Download here.

Book Smarts Booklet
As a creative professional, your portfolio is your primary branding vehicle and should accurately capture your particular strengths and qualifications. This guide is designed to serve as a reference as you create a portfolio that showcases your talents.
Inside, you’ll find tips for selecting samples, organizing items, creating an online portfolio, presenting your books to clients, and more.
Download here.

Photoshop Tutorial – Removing Gordon Brown’s Bags

Gordon Brown’s been going through the mill a bit recently and his undereye bags are getting bigger. Here’s a quick method of retouching any photograph in Photoshop to reduce or remove undereye bagginess. Now if I could just do this permanently to myself …

1. Open the portrait that you want to retouch. I’m using this portrait of the British Prime Minister. Before doing any retouching, it’s always a good idea to make a duplicate image on a separate layer. To do this press Ctrl+J /Cmd+J. You’ll now have the same pic of Gordon Brown on two separate layers. Select the top layer to work on and keep the bottom layer in case of accidents.

   

2. Select the Patch Tool (J), which is hidden under the Spot Healing Brush tool.

   

   The Patch tool works like a combination of the Lasso tool and the Healing Brush tool.

3. Zoom in around the eyes so you can clearly see what you’re doing. Drag an area around the one of the eye bags and release the mouse button. You’ll see the dancing ants around the selection you’ve just made.

   

4. Now, with the Patch tool still selected, click and drag that selection to another part of the face that is nice and smooth, a cheek for example.

   

   You’ll see that once you start dragging, you’re taking a copy of your selection and pulling it to another part of the image. Your original selection is going to look quite strange and the skin colours will look completely wrong. That’s ok. Keep dragging to the smooth part of the face with no wrinkles, then release the mouse. Your original selection will now be replace with smooth(ish) skin! Photoshop will replace the old bags with the smooth skin of the cheeks, but importantly, it attempts to keep the same skin tone of the original area. Pretty amazing really.

   

5. Ok, that’s one eye done. Now repeat steps 3 and 4 on the other eye.

   

   You should end up with a fairly, youthful, well rested model.

6. Now if you think that your model is looking too youthful, this is where our layers come in. Simply reduce the opacity of the top layer that you’ve been working on, so that you can see some of the wrinkles showing through from underneath. This will give a more authentic look to your retouching.

And our completed retouched Gordon Brown, looks like this:

Before (Left) and After

Your Business Card Is Crap

This guy is (accidentally) hilarious. Wow, took him 25 years to design it and I’m sure you’ll agree the time was worth it!

Digital Photography Digest 10/6/09

A nice post from last year on Smashing Magazine with some beautiful examples of Black and White Photography. The link below shows a photograph by Nick Brandt.

The Fashion Photography Blog have written some excellent articles on Promoting Your Photography Business. Part One is here and Part Two is here.

Some very early pictures of the Beatles. Very interesting to look at and I have to admit I would love to do a bit of photomanipulation with them.

Thank You To Blacknight!

I want to say a big thank you to Michele at Blacknight for my new graphics tablet. A Wacom Intuos 4L, which I absolutely love. The graphics tablet was a prize in a t-shirt competition that took place recently on the Blacknight blog and I was one of the lucky winners. I’ve been using Wacom tablets for about five years now and would find it nearly impossible to work without one, but my last tablet – a Graphire, was well and truly on it’s last legs. The buttons had fallen off the pen, the tablet was scratched to bits and I’m embarrassed to say there was actually crumbs jammed into the “scroll-y” part.  I’ll write a full review of the Intuos 4L in the coming weeks as I’m still test-driving but so far it feels like I’ve moved from a Morris Minor to a Ferrari.

Here’s a picture of my new toy.

And here’s the t-shirts I designed;

If you haven’t come across Blacknight before, I should mention that they are the best hosting providers in Europe (and no, I am not biased!) and you should check them out for excellent, reliable hosting and domain names.

How To Quickly & Accurately Straighten An Image In Photoshop

Here’s a quick way and easy way to accurately straighten up your photos if they’re looking a bit lopsided. As with many techniques in Photoshop, there is more than one way to straighten a photo. This method uses the measure tool.

1. Open up the picture that needs to be straightened. Here’s one I took where it looks like the water is running towards the right hand side of the image.

2. Select the Measure tool from Photoshop’s Toolbox. It’s one of the tools hidden underneath the eyedropper tool. Click and hold the mouse on the eyedropper till you see the flyout menu.

3. Look for something in the picture that you know should be straight. In this case, the horizon line between the sky and sea.
Click-and-drag the Measure tool horizontally along this straight edge in your photo, starting from the left and extending to the right.

You’ll notice that as you start to drag, the angle that you’re dragging at, will be displayed in the Info palette (if you have it open) and also at the top of the screen in the Options Bar.

4. Choose Image > Rotate Canvas. Then choose Arbitrary, which opens up the Rotate Canvas dialog box.

Here’s the really clever part. Photoshop will have already filled in the angle required and whether it should be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise. So all you need to do now is click OK.

Voila! A straightened picture. As you can see, we’re left with some extra canvas, so we need to crop off the excess.

5. Select the Crop tool from the toolbox or press C, then drag out a cropping border. When you’re happy with the crop, press Return/Enter.

And the final, cropped and straightened image looks like this.

Is this a method you’ve used before in Photoshop? What other ways have you straightened images?

Illustrator Drawing Tools Series

Last week on Sitepoint I wrote a series on how to use how to use the Illustrator drawing tools. The series is written mainly for people who are new to Illustrator, but you may find it useful even if you’ve been using Illustrator for a while. Here’s what’s covered;

1. The Line Tools
2. The Shape Tools
3. The Pencil & Smooth Tools
4. The Pen Tool – Straight Lines & Editing
5. The Pen Tool – Curved Paths

Hope you find it useful.

Post Election (De)Motivational Posters

So the election results have been coming in since yesteday afternoon and it seems like the Green Party have had their bottoms well and truly kicked. I almost feel sorry for them. If they hadn’t sold out and gone into governement two years ago they would probably have done really well. Also getting a good kicking, but not as much as hoped are Fianna Fail. Here’s two post-election posters I made using the DIY Demotivator.

Design Digest 6/6/09

Google are looking for a Web Graphic Artist.

Mark Boulton’s article on Saving The Creative Spark

Great collection of images of the Danse Macabre from Cornell University

Five interesting ways to spice up your Facebook profile pic.

Nice interview with vector artist Chris Leavens on Vec Tips.