I wanted a visual for a tutorial I'm writing, and since circles are cool, I immediately thought of a Venn diagram. I also happened to be clicking around Wikipedia at the time -- took one glance at the logo and came up with this

Wow, talk about obscure XKCD jokes. I think I missed that original comic, actually. Anyway, good thinking, I look forward to seeing where you take it.

Okay! I've got a photoshop gig coming up and I need some tips on what to do in GIMP. I'm going to need to make a solid color (white) wall disappear. In photoshop I'd go to blending options and move the white slider up a few numbers so the layer underneath would show through. See image below. Basically, Blend if this layer is outside the slider values. So, for my project I'd want 0 to about 245, so 246 to 255 would vanish on the current layer, showing the underlaying layer. I'm likely going to have to do it again on the layer underneath to show a third layer, but after that all I have to do is add text and make it look good.



If I can't learn GIMP before I need to do this, I'll just download a CS5.5 Demo and I'll have thirty days to do the job - more than I need and longer than I'm sure my client would want to wait! Haha.

You can easily do the same sort of things to mess with blending options in the GIMP. Perhaps you can work iwith a sample photo from an old shoot beforehand to get a feel for it? The Blending Options are in the Layers palette.

I ended up not needing the blending options like I thought I did, they ended up wanting some different concepts. I'm sure I could be doing this in GIMP but I know my way around Photoshop fairly well so I downloaded the CS5.1 Demo from Adobe. I'll totally beat 30 days as they need these done by Tuesday morning. I'm calling it a day for now, here's where my progress resides.



Sadly, I'm working with images provided to me. I would have much rather taken them and gone over them with my client but I'll have to make do, notably with the shadow on the basketball on the top-right and his chopped off leg. But other than that photo, the images were taken decently and were handed off to me in Camera RAW. So I can at least get back detail in shadows and manipulate the settings of the photo with ultimate freedom.

If I finish with enough time I'm going to try and find a good photo of the Official ABA basketball and try to blend that in over the ones with shadows. Like I mentioned, if I have enough time before my Tuesday morning deadline.

It there's one thing that stands out to me, it's how bad the text looks. You did a good job of cutting out the people, although they seem sad floating in the whiteness of Nothing to me, but I find that text to just grate on me for some reason. Ignore me though, good work.

Haha, yeah. I agree 100% and more. I'm using it as a place holder until I get a high quality version of their logo. The ABA logo is 1500x1500 resampled lower, but it's hard to resample up and get 19x24" poster quality prints. I'm really hoping they have a high quality logo, it's not going to be fun to remake their logo, or at least find a fitting font since topography isn't my forte.

That's a great logo, but I definitely agree you need a vector version of that if you're going to blow it up at all, with that much detail.

They ended up having a large enough JPEG, not a vector version like I suggested I'd need.

The Tuesday Morning deadline was just barely missed, but that's something they knew - but was hoping I could make - would likely happen. I'm just a few tweaks away from a final so hopefully they'll have a version they can use in their hands tomorrow if not when I get home from work tonight.

Rick or treat:



That be my first animated Gimpstuff.

Comic, did that end up working out? Deep Thought, very nicely done.

Well, it's a bit more obscure of a joke angle I'm going for, but after 5 failed attempts at making an "obama-hope" picture of myself, I made a "free-iraq" one for the shoots and giggles:



(I'm putting it here because I used GIMP to clean it up a lot -- the website I used to make the original sucked and was only useful for the basic outline)

It did! Officially finished everything today.


3x5 Front & Back


A poster to place on walls for promotion.


I did a lot of custom work, almost making the background from scratch, adding the texture to the teams name. They supplied the demands, I made the poster to their acceptance. I'm not a fan of the title font, though and the cracked look plus the red glow doesn't really help the readability. But, it looks neat.

The background was suppose to be brushed metal, but then they wanted it to have a diamond plate feel, so I found a useable file online and made it a seamless pattern for easy use.

Once I make the copyright page on my website I'll link you guys to it so you can check out all the sources I used.

Here's a not-quite full size view of the poster. I made it as a 16x24" (or something close) poster at 300DPI, the file is huge!

Looks nice

That looks really good I really like the background. The red behind the players seems a little bit odd, though... With the images scaled down (either because you did, or C6M does), the font doesn't look that hard to read, though with that last image you posted (which seems to be the actual size), I can definitely see the difficulty in it. How long, from start to finish, did it take?

I was going to complain that the cracked red glow made it less readable, but if the client insisted, I guess that's the only option. If I were you, I would have also done a subtle glow or border on the Twitter/Facebook icons to set them off a bit, but it's only a minor nit-pick.

That's a great suggestion KermM! The next thing I do for them I'll have to suggest that.

My invoice records just over half a day of work spread over almost three weeks.

Here's the Copyright Page on my website listing all the resources used in the creation.

I bet you underbilled yourself. Here's some more totally OCD nitpicks about your (very nicely coded!) copyright page's content:

:: '...by the artists "rules"' should be " artists' "
:: 'the provided PSD were was made' were was!
:: 'derived from Dry, cracking clay' -> "dry"

These are just stupid things, probably not even worth your time to fix.

Regarding the page/code, why thanks! I'm glad you spotted those, I prefer to look as professional as possible - grammar included.

Very happy to hear it, a man after my own heart. To keep the ball rolling, I see from Facebook that you have two more jobs lined up?