Hello!! Not a request, which I hope is okay, but I was hoping I could ask: What do you use (as in like programs/apps) to make things like your mood-boards or outfit boards? And if possible, do you have any tips for making some myself? I've made a couple before but I always seem to struggle with thinking of objects and stuff to put on them. Thank you in advance, and I hope you have a wonderful day!! :-]
Of course you can ask!! <3
I use Ibis Paint X (freely available for android and iOS) and have been for multiple years. It's actually a drawing up but it's GREAT for editing too!! It takes a bit getting used to but once you get the hang of all the controls it's super easy I promise :D
Please always let me know if (any of) you have more questions, I'll be super happy to follow up!! <3
Outfit Board Tips:
- Stick to a specific theme (i.e. The Zoo)
- I like to start with the outfit (I'm a big fan of shorts if it wasn't obvious), you can also use it for color guidance!
- I usually like to include at least one outfit, one food item and one plushie
- I think it's also important to keep the age group you want to make the board for in mind, it helps with searching for toys
- As for choosing the items, I usually think of me and my childhood and what I want(ed) to play with myself! You can often find specific toys/food items with a google image search (i.e. i searched for Zoo Cookies, Capri Sun Orange, Monkey Board Game)
- In my opinion, a big part of making something look nice is composition. I usually work with three sizes of images: big, middle and small. I try to only put two big elements (one being the outfit) and put them farthest apart from each other. I place middle images randomly and fill in the spaces with the small images (which are usually "clutter" like legos, shells, gummies etc. all the same thing but different colors/shapes)
- As for where to find pngs, I usually use Pinterest, Google and Tumblr (#agerepngs) and I make my own pngs with background remover websites such as remove.bg or pixian.ai BUT you can also make them yourself with Ibis Paint X or PicsArt!
- And lastly, I like to do fun little swirls & patterns around the object to fill the empty spaces even more
Okay I hope this wasn't too elaborate lol thank you so much for your ask, I really hope it helps you a bit!! Good luck, I'd love to see some of your stuff if you wanna tag me or send it to me :D <3 oh & final product of the example mood board I used can be found here 🐘🐒🐊
hey, lee! could you please recommend a couple of video tutorials on editing, esp color balancing? btw, i'm absolutely in love with your story, characters and aesthetic 💛 💫
Oh hell yeah! I’ll link some of my favorites to use from used the most often to absolutely overdoing it that I really only have used once but it turned out rad anyway
1. Used the most
Colour in Storytelling - Not a tutorial per say, but I like looking at it to see if its possible for me to convey certain moods with different color or lighting set ups
Reverse Key Lighting - I use this stuff for some in game lighting nonsense
Color Grading with Gradient Maps in photoshop - Exactly what it says
Screenshot Editing Tutorial - an oldy but a goody, helped me most when I was trying to find a style. I don’t really do most of these things that much but I love the pointers about the facial shadows
Adding Depth of Field - There’s a lot of tutorials about this one around but it’s the main thing that people talk about when it comes to Reshade use.
2. Used often, but can be lived without
Matte Paintings - Pretty basic one, personally I like making them myself but that’s just because i’m particular the few times I’ve done it even though... none of those posts are up yet
Gel/dual lighting - We love a good two tone for dramatic effects
Horizontal Curve - To make things moody and darker without sacrificing the contrast or details!
3. I’ve only used these once but it’s always a good time
Cinema graphs - We love a good flare
Volumetric Light - This one is for after effects but if you want to add some dynamic dappled light or streaks from windows basically the same thing applies. I just had it in a moving frame when I first looked it up
I’m sorry if you’ve answered this before, but how do you get your gifs to have such high quality and still fit tumblrs dimensions? Whenever I size mine down in ps, they always look grainy ;;
That’s fine, if I did ever answer this before it was so long ago and I don’t care to deep-search my blog for it LOL.
I recommend all editors who struggle with having 540p gifs under 3M to read this!
Before all that though, quick tip: here is the order of editing I have found give my gifs their best quality:
Resize and/or crop gif
((place static image if I have one; read more for what I’m talking about))
Apply PSD’s/adjustment layers
Flatten frames into layers
Sharpen gif
I found that sharpening before applying PSD’s makes a gif look unnaturally sharp (example, defined edges of characters and details are bit too extreme)
Below I go over palette/color count, frame count/rate, diffusion, and gifs with partially static areas.
TRANSPARENCY
I always have Transparency checked. Does it take a slot up in the color count? Yeah, but it also makes a gif take up considerably less space! And unless you SPECIFICALLY have a 100% transparent pixel in your gif, your gif will still be absolutely opaque, I promise. Below is a palette from a 500p gif.
PALETTE
I also try to color my gifs so they have a specific palette. A lot of times the color count of my gifs look like one or two main colors.
Now notice how many colors those two gifs above have? Not a lot. Seriously not anywhere near 256 colors. BUT, There are a few ways that this goes unnoticed. One, the specific color palette really helps. Because all the color slots are similar to each other, even if there’s half the color count, it’s not obvious. Here’s a gif from 2014, before I learned adjustment layers and how to give specific palettes to a gif:
This gif originally had all 256 colors, but lowering to half really makes it have a grainy feel :/ But here’s a similar gif I made in 2016, where I gave it a more specific palette:
The same amount of colors, but because the colors aren’t so widely different from each other, the graininess isn’t nearly as apparent.
I’ll even try to make it so the darker colors in a gif have the same/similar hues. Back in 2013 and 2014 I would have to use this to the extreme; I would use a purple color and put it on ‘lighten’ so that would cut out a few darker colors and lower the color count:
In the gif below, notice how the darker the color, the blue it is. It’s a similar technique to the top but it’s done by using the Selective Color adjustment layer (on ‘color’ blending mode) to change the black/darker colors to a more specific one. This saves color space as well as adds a sense of harmony to the palette.
I also use this technique when using gifs that purposely have different colors:
These two are part of the same gifset. Notice how in both images the darker colors gradually become more purple in hue. Even though one gif is red and another is blue, the dark purple colors create a connection between the two gifs. (that last part doesn’t have anything to do with saving color slots but I thought i’d mention it anyway LOL)
DITHERING
I also have my dithering set to Pattern. I believe this actually makes a gif take MORE space, but it makes a gif look great. Sure it does add a sense of graininess, but every gif has that due to a 256 color limit, and pattern levels out the graininess in an organized manner. However, if a gif is too big, and I can’t afford to sacrifice the pixel size, frame rate, or anymore colors, clicking Diffusion or No Dither is my last resort.
STATIC AREAS
Another thing I do that really helps me (but I understand not everyone wanting to do this too) is I use images that create a static, or still, area of the gif:
The first gif has a texture overlapping the entire gif on a slight opacity. Even doing this can help lower the gif size. There’s also a solid color text that even though it is blinking and changing, that large section of white in the gif will help reduce the size.
The second image has a completely opaque image, and this can reduce a gif size a LOT. You can still add psds and edit it to make it less boring.
And the third image has a smokey texture, an image and text all together so your gif can still look complex, but still reduce the gif size.
The use of static images and animated ones give a nice sense of different things to focus on too. The viewer can take a second to recognize both the gif and the image/text.
CONCLUSION:
You can always make a gif smaller in size by cutting down the canvas size or deleting frames, but these were some other things I don’t always see editors doing but it GREATLY helps in size.
I’ve had a lot of asks about my gameplay editing, so I finally made this crude tutorial that will hopefully answer all the questions I got!
First things first, open up your image and my psd
Drag over the psd groups you want, and fiddle with the opacity layers; I usually have the ‘base’ and ‘colour pop’ set to 25% because of my reshade, but you’ll need to figure out what best works for your screenshots
Depending on your screenshot you might need to brighten it up, in which case I usually add a few of the curves layers with the lighter preset
Run texture smoothing from this action pack and then run this sharpening action twice
Then run topaz clean with these settings
Use the 3D action and then the noise action from this pack, then ‘filter-> sharpen -> unsharp mask’ with the settings above
Crop the picture into a square, double click the background layer and hit enter, select ‘image -> canvas size’ and set it to 40cm by 40cm, or really anything that looks decent to you, and finally ‘filter -> smart sharpen’ with the settings above
Hope this was of use to someone, and if you need anymore help please let me know! ♥
salutations! do you want to understand, at a basic level, how to use the pen tool better in various editing softwares like photoshop and photopea?
play the beziére game today! (https://bezier.method.ac/#)
it's fun <3
alternatively, they also offer the boolean game! (https://boolean.method.ac/)
i definitely recommend checking out the related games and resources this site has to offer, i find that these are some easy, beginner-friendly, and interesting platforms to learn some skills that can help you in using editing softwares, as well crossover to other fields like understanding certain concepts in maths (set theory, geometry, etc) and computer science (boolean theory)!
DaVince Resolve Not Showing Multiple Audio Tracks [Fix]
For those who are having a problem with DaVinci Resolve not showing multiple tracks in your Edit tab, this could be the fix for you. I spent 3 hours scouring the internet for the solution and some will advice you to download post processing tools. But then I found out that might not be necessary.
In this guide, I will also explain OBS multiple audio recording because that was the source of my audio tracks for editing, as well as how to check if your recording or video has multiple audio tracks. I advice you to check your video first for multiple tracks before importing them to DaVinci just to save yourself the hassle of going back and forth.
This works for .mkv and .mp4 files. I cannot guarantee other file formats.
You can skip this part if you're not recording your audio tracks in OBS.
How to record multiple audio tracks in OBS
Go to Settings > Audio
Assign the correct external and internal audio sources in this section. For me, I only needed Desktop Audio and my mic. I assigned my mic to Mic Audio 3. If you want to add a separate audio track for your game capture, music, etc., please check this video by Activater.
2. Go to Settings > Output. Change Output Mode to Advanced. Click on Recording tab.
Choose your Recording Path. Choose .mkv for Recording Format. For the Video Encoder, I selected x264, but if you have NVIDIA or any better video encoder then choose that. Audio Encoder is set to FFmpeg AAC.
Now in Audio Track, select how many tracks you want to be recorded separately. The numbers are not relative to what number your Desktop Audio or Mic Audio is. The numbers mean the Audio Tracks that will be embedded to your recording.
My Audio Track 1 is going to include both the Desktop Audio and the Mic Audio 3.
Audio Track 2 is only the Desktop Audio.
Audio Track 3 is only the Mic Audio 3.
You can set up which external/internal audio sources will be tracked in each Audio Track in the next step.
If you require more than three audio tracks, tick more boxes, but note what numbers you ticked. Just tick them in order, and not randomly.
I don't have any knowledge on this section, but if you're wondering, I changed nothing when I set the Video Encoder to x264, and this is how it looks.
3. Click Apply, then Ok. Exit Settings. Select the Gear icon in Audio Mixer.
For my particular setup, this is what it looks like:
Under Tracks, this is where you can set which audio sources will be recorded for each Audio Track. Notice that I didn't tick any of the boxes for Mic/Aux. That's because I don't need it.
Since I need my Audio Track 1 to have both Desktop Audio and Mic Audio 3, I tick the Track Box 1 for both. That means it will record both audio sources in Track 1. When you're done recording and open your video, you should be able to hear the audio sources you've ticked for Track 1. If I ticked only Desktop Audio and unticked Mic Audio 3 for Track 1, then I will only hear the Desktop Audio in the video file. Video players usually only play the Audio Track 1 by default. But you can switch listening to other audio tracks using VLC or MPC-HC media player.
For my Audio Track 2, I only needed Desktop Audio so I only ticked that. Then for my Audio Track 3, I only needed Mic Audio 3 so I only ticked that.
For VLC:
Right-click. Audio > Audio Tracks > (select track)
If you were following the steps for the OBS recording, you will hear multiple audio sources on Track 1, whichever ones you've ticked.
How to Show Multiple Audio Tracks on DaVinci Resolve
Before importing your video, please check first if your video does have multiple audio tracks. The guide for this is just above this one, if you skipped it.
Add your video to the Edit tab.
Some videos will automatically show all of the audio tracks. But for me, it didn't. And since you're reading this, then we had the same problem. This shows my Audio Track 1.
2. Manually Add Audio Tracks
You can select Stereo or Mono, or whichever is needed for your editing project. Stereo utilizes separate right and left channels, while Mono plays back only through a single channel. Game and music audio is best kept on Stereo so that music and sound effects are panned between left and right ear. For voiceover audio tracks, they can just be Mono but it depends on how it was recorded!
3. Duplicate your Audio 1 to your new audio tracks.
Select all audio clips, right click, click Clip Attributes.
Go to Audio tab.
Embedded Channels contain all the Audio Tracks of your video. You simply just need to select the ones you need for each track.
My audio sources were recorded in Stereo, including voiceovers, so that's why everything is in Stereo format. If you recorded with Mono, you can go with that format. Make sure that if it's in Stereo, both left and right have the same embedded channel like you see here. Otherwise, it will pick up other audio sources for that track.
And then you have your separate multiple audio tracks! You're welcome.
It's a bit difficult to differentiate between my Audio Track 1 and 2 here but if you look really closely at the soundwaves, you'll spot the difference.
I tested this for both .mkv and .mp4 files that contain multiple audio tracks. So it should work. Otherwise, something probably went wrong during the recording in the audio output settings, or you muted a track during recording. Maybe you also need to change the audio encoder that suits your format. I don't answers to those anymore. Gonna have to ask someone else.
In Adobe Premiere Pro CC2018 there are new transitions called immersive video transitions, which are added for VR360 videos, however you can also apply them to normal videos to get a different kind of transitions. Also these transitions are easy to apply, as you just drag and drop them between two clips, however its too bad you can’t ramp the animations but only make it slower or faster by…
