Open your picture in ps. Draw one beam (like a long triangle) in ps with the pen tool. Go to the layers panel, select the layer with the newly created shape and drag it into the 'new layer' symbol (looks like a sheet of paper with one corner folded). This will copy the shape into a new (third) layer. Go to Edit; Transform Path; Rotate or press ctrl+t (pc) or Option(apple)+t (mac) and move the rotation center (showing in the middle) towards the sharp corner of your shape. Now rotate the shape and press enter. Repeat this proces until your beams go all the way around. Link all the layers with shapes in them and merge them. Or go to the top shape layer and pres ctrl+e (pc) or option+e (mac) untill al shape layers are merged. Select the layer with your beams shape in the layers pannel and use the magic wand (w) to make a selection of the shape. Hide the layer with the shape and select the layer with your pic, but keep the selection active. Now you can try going to Image; Adjustments; Hue/Saturation and play with the sliders. Hope this gets the job done, Mike

Go to Image and select Image Size. Set the size to 200x200 px (max allowed) and resolution to 72 dpi. Go to file, Save For Web and select GIF instead of JPEG. The color table that pops up shows the colors in your image. Default is 256, you can set it to 128 or less and see in the left bottom corner how it reduces the file size. You can also shift select the colors you think are not needed in the Color Table window and delete them. Good luck

Nice stuff! I agree on the need for banking on the flyby, other than that; great work!!! The 'cheesy' voices don't bother me that much, if it were me, I'd keep'em, they add to the confusing atmo you got going... Keep at it, Gtz

Try opening Photoshop, go to preferences, choose Plug-ins and scratch disks and choose a primary scratch disk and optionaly a second. If you have an external hard drive (with more memory than the local), set it as first, if not, leave your local as first (if not selected yet, select it). Then go to Memory and Image Cache (also in prefs) and under Memory usage set Maximum Used by Photoshop to 100%. Not sure, but it might do the trick... Let me know if it worked, Mike

or read this; Terragen is software to create 3d worlds, mostly landscapes of all kinds

Open the pic in ps. Select the crop tool (or press c). At the top you can enter your prefered width and height dimensions. Be sure to add 'in' to it if inches are not set to default in your preferences. You can also enter a value for the resolution. The 300 dpi will probly go up as you reduce the size of your original image, so if you want you can leave it blank and end up with a slightly higher res pic, or you could enter a value of 300. Drag the crop tool in your image to define what part of the image you want to end up with and press enter. Voila... Grtz

This is so cool!!! Very original dude... Good luck with this entry! Grtz

This would be easier if you had posted an image of what you have so far... A lot depends on the amount of detail and level of antialiasing in your render... I have never worked with vue, so my advice could very well turn out to be totaly useles, but what the hell; you never know... 1) If you only want to blur the background, I suggest you make a seperate render of it, without the vipers. Open this render in ps and apply a motion blur to it (Filter; Blur; Motion Blur...) You could then render the vipers with a complete black background and select them in ps, then copy/paste them on the blurry pic. Selecting the vipers by using the lasso and zoom tool will take a lot of time and effort and may still look crappy after all... 2) There are many ways to create an afterburn and smoke. The best way to do this would be to use a 3d app like lightwave and use particleFX. But I'm asuming you want to use ps for this... One way would be to use a photo of a flame from a candle, apply a subtile gradient in another layer on top of it to ad some color efects and use the erase tool to ad some transparancy at the end of the exhaust. Try the vue forum before giving all this a go, they might be able to provide a much easier solution to your problem. Grtz

Some say maya is harder to start from, I know little (well ok nothing) about it's render options. I do know Lightwave is much cheaper... I often render for print in Lightwave and am happy with the results so far. You need to 'trick' the 72dpi resolution by rendering large frames. I have tried rendering at maximum resolution (16000 if I remeber right) but you may not need that much. For highly detailed images I use a 12000x8400 camera resolution, with highest antialiasing settings, but you can get away with less for printsizes below A4. Grtz

Very sweet indeed, thanks Infocentral

Now this is a challenge amlan!!! Wiseman makes a good point, applying a bump texture is the first thing that comes to mind. The problem he mentions is correct, yet it can be overcome. All depends on your knowledge of PS and how much work you want to put into this... In PS you could reduce the black&white contrast and remove the strong highlights by selecting and adjusting them. This may be a way to make the bumping work better... You could also try applying (one or two 'p's?) Treshold (Image; Adjustments; Treshold) and apply the b&w image as a bump, not sure about the result though... Last but not least you could make a cloud-like shape in Illustrator, open it in PS, apply Clouds to it (Filter; Render; Clouds), paste the face in it and use the eraser and Smudge Tool to make it blend nicely with your cloud in the underlying layer. This may be useless advice since I'm only brainstorming as I type this, but it might just be worth the try... Grtz

Well, for this you definitely need 3D software... I myself am a Lightwave-freak, so I know how to do it using LW, but any 3D program could get the job done... For lightwave I'd sugest either two aproaches; -either create a simple surface (a 4 point polygon), convert the first pic you've posted into a black and white pic (using photoshop or any other 2D program that can do so) and ad this pic as a bump map into surface editor. -Or, create a 4 point poly with enough segments, use the magnet tool to raise the points or polys you've selected and create your elevations, then use Smoothshift to ad the detail. There is a program called Terragen that is specifically used for creating landscapes, much like the one you need, so maybe try the gallery and see who you want to contact by Instant messaging... Good luck, Mike