Can anyone tell me how to postwork a blur on the blades of this helicopter. I tried using motion blur and other filters, but it blurred both the blades and the surrounding atmosphere. Even if I took the blades into a different layer, the blur that resulted was at the wrong angle in relation to the plane of the blades. Any help appreciated.

not sure i can give you a simple "click-action" solution but i'd like to experiment with your pic if you don't mind...

:)
retrocity

I dont see how you can do it unless you brush it in yourself. why dont you try using the smudge tool with sime rough texture, that might help.

you could try drawing out the blades on a separate layer as they would look if viewed from the top. and then do a spin motion blur on it. you could then superimpose that layer on this pic and manually distort the layer so that the two gel. am i making sense? lemme see if i can post a non-text version of this but don't count on it happening really soon. am swamped with work.......

revised instructions 1> start up a new file. make sure its a square (say 800x800px). 2> draw a dark-coloured, thickish line (20px), rasterize the layer and duplicate it. 3> hit ctrl+t on the duplicate layer and rotate it through 90 degrees. you should have a cross now. 4> merge the two layers with the lines making the cross. be sure not to merge the background too!! 5> add 75% monochromatic, gaussian noise to the cross. these are the helicopter 'blades' viewed from on top. 6> link the background and the blades layers, select the background layer to set it active, and align the layers (Layers --> Align Linked --> Vertical Centres ....repeat for Horizontal...) 7> open up your image and get rid of the stationary halicopter blades using the stamp, heal tools. 8> drag the blades layer from the other file into this file. alternatively, you could also copy/paste... 9.5> optional :-D... you might want to invert the colours so you can see your blades on the dark pic. 9> hit ctrl+t.... now this is the crux of this tute... 10> keeping the ctrl key pressed, try dragging on the corner handles with the mouse. you'll be able to distort the blades any way you want to (limitation being that the bounding box cannot be a concave quadrilateral) 11> once you have distorted the blades so that they look ok, hit enter. 11.5> invert colours back :-D 12> position the blades on the rotor. do they look too light to you? 13> duplicate the layer twice (that's what worked for me) 14> erase variable parts of the duplicate layers to give added realism (lighter foreground, darker background) 15> and you're done :-D these are the steps which i followed to get to the attached image. my instructions should be lucid enough. if you do get stuck, post here, we'll help out :-D palash

hey! forgot to mention, you can play about with different amounts of radial blur to give different effects (slow rotor, fast rotor) experiment and see what works for you. this pic i put up is just a quick fiz. and yeah, do post your final take here :-D we all would love to take a look... palash

Thanks, mpalash. Can't wait to try it.

Beautiful job palash! far better than mine ;) nice instructions too (i'm going to run through them myself and see where i went off ;)) glad your not too busy to stop by and offer help see you around :) scott

he he he........thanks retro..... i'm never to busy to offer help. just hate typing too much (which explains why i didn't reply to your messages, sorry) but i love photoshop :-D i return to college on the 10th. i'll see you again in 4mnths after that. take care. i miss this place :-S palash