#manipping

[weinzapfeltalks]

I’m back on my bs while watching @misslane’s videos :’)

[letsmanip]

[youareavision]

Dom and Kat have both been on Murdoch Mysteries. Here's an art AU for you... something with them both in it.

Yes! I’m totally interested in this... so interested in fact I had already set up resources and stuff to make it happen one day :-)

[aikainkauna]

@paddyfitz answered your question “Ever wondered what goes into a manip?”

Yes please

Shall do at some point, then! I did go back and look at my old manipping tutorials on and updated them a bit. There are three comprehensive ones here, here and here. Sadly, they don’t really have pictures (and I’m glad, because those links would be long dead now), but they’re mostly just lists of good rules of thumb. Photoshop’s evolved quite a bit since then (I wrote those in 2007-2008) and I’ve developed tons of new techniques and become far better than I was then, but a lot of it should still be valuable. For instance, I moaned a lot about overly painted styles because I’d overdone it myself earlier, and because everyone else was overdoing it as well (wanting to be the next Theban Band) at the time. And because the end result was often too mushy for many of the modern/futuristic fandoms like Doctor Who. Whereas now, of course, a painterly style and a romantic setting is something that ToB manips actually *need* in order to work. You can’t really throw Jaffar and the Princess under modern porn movie lighting, but have to darken the set with curtains made of old saris and stuff like that. (If you want awesome, high-res and beautiful fabric textures, I really can’t recommend eBay’s used sari shops enough, seriously.)

I haven’t ever done a blow-by-blow “how to make a manip” post before because of the amount of time and screenshots it’d take (I barely had time to go over some of that stuff really quickly during a convention workshop that took one hour). It’s a huge amount of work, so I can’t promise to do anything of the sort, but I’ll see what I can do about the piece-by-piece manip elements thing. One problem, of course, is that I wouldn’t want to ruin the suspension of disbelief on any existing manip, so it might take a while for me to find one to “sacrifice,” as it were:)

If there is any particular thing anyone was wondering about--as in, “Grouse, how in the hell do you do that”, I’d be glad to answer any questions of that sort as well?

[aikainkauna]

Ever wondered what goes into a manip?

Would anybody actually be interested in a blow-by-blow breakdown of a manip? Not so much a tutorial but a chart of everything that goes into one, because it’s a lot of stuff (my current one has 70 layers at this point, and it’s actually below the average number of layers). I made some manipping tutorials back in the LJ days (and will link to them once I’ve checked they’re not too shit... and I do fear I might just cringe at everything in them, now), but this would be more of a map, a list of contents. Because it might surprise you, I reckon.

Anyone interested?

[gothamgirl28]

I suck at manipping. That is all.

[absedarian]

Hey there, I'm looking at your wedding day manipulation. Emma is perfect! Seriously, the shadows, neck height, proportions etc. Spot on. Can you tell me more about how you did the Regina one though? It's a teeny bit off. I'm not sure why.

Hi there :) First off, I’m glad you like the Emma part of the manip. As for your question: I’m not quite sure how to answer it because I basically did it the same way I did the Emma one … :)

As always, I’m not entirely happy with it … but then again I never am, so that doesn’t really mean all that much.