My GPS Camera Phone

I’m amazed at the amount of nearly correct guesses there were with this one. Lots of you said something about a reflection or water, which was nearly correct, but the actual source of that was the water cooler in the hallway.

The horizontal and vertical stripes are part of the bottle and the “hair” behind it is actually some hideous textured wallpaper. I will never look at the walls the same way again.

The angle of the shot was taken just below the water level inside the container, which gave it that reflected look. All I did in Photoshop was adjust the contrast and crop out the top and bottom.

Without further ado, this weeks winners: MommyWizdom, Mojo, dcr (bonus points for telling me about the broken link), Michelle Gartner, CatSynth, Raven, strider, Sister Sassy (bonus points for the hairy arm reference), Bill (bonus points for creativity), and Marsha. Good job, hope to see you around soon! (Like tomorrow!)

All this week, I’ll be featuring nothing but gray. Two reasons: 1) it’s a theme thing that sounded fun and 2) my camera phone takes better grayscale shots.

There’s an interesting side note on how my phone takes black-and-white. Instead of capturing the image in grayscale color mode, it captures a desaturated RGB image. Is this the case for all digital imaging? I just found it somewhat interesting.

Anyway, the picture here is my trusty Weber grill that I’ve been using for about seven years and it’s still going strong. Gas? Who needs gas? Well-weathered and seasoned, this old-school charcoal grill has produced some of the best slow-smoked pork butts this side of the Mississippi. It will be a sad day when it finally falls to pieces.

I didn’t realize the time, so stop by Dan’s blog and thank him for getting this post out the door today. On to the how-to!

Nothing was coming to me last Tuesday night, which nearly led to me not participating in yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday. Instead of giving in, I tried something that works for me when I get stuck: I went back to basics. Locating a simple image was the first step. After an intense staring contest with computer screen, I decided to re-visit the blending modes, but this time using one image with multiple modes and layers.

After opening the image above in Photoshop CS2, I desaturated the image and then copied the background layer six times, which ends up giving me seven layers total to work with. Switch off the visibility of all layers except the background and the layer above it.

Note: There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Experiment with different layers’ opacity and blending modes for many different results.

I left the background layer at 100% opacity as a foundation for the next six layers above it. Then, starting with the next layer above the background, rotate the layer via “Edit->Transform->Rotate” to any position desired. Try thinking ahead to the final finished product when doing this. Once the image is rotated to your liking, press Enter and the transformation will apply to the layer.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Change the layer’s blending mode to whatever you want, depending on the effect you are trying to achieve. In this case, I utilized Overlay and Multiply on various layers to get the effect you saw yesterday. You can also play around with layer opacity settings, but I don’t believe I did that on this image.

Once completed, turn on the visibility of the next layer and repeat the process. You will probably end up going back to lower layers for some fine tuning, but the end result will be nothing like the original photo.

With regard to blending modes, I’m partial to Mulitply, Overlay and Screen, but I’ve been leaning toward Luminosity as of late. Do you have a preferred blending mode or techniques? Let me know in the comments.

The closest guessers from yesterday: dcr, Chica, Raven, CatSynth, The Right Blue, Ryanne, on the Rock, smarmoofus, DrillerAA, Shiela, Secret Agent Mama, SarahHub, Sister Sassy, BK, Michelle Gartner, Vixen, Brony, kelly and nance (my darling wife).

Hey wait, that’s everyone who commented. Oh well, I’ll bend the rules a bit this week. Next week, though, only the closest guess (or two) wins a link! (Multiple guesses/comments allowed.)