Aioria opened this issue on Dec 23, 2007 · 9 posts
Aioria posted Sun, 23 December 2007 at 3:27 AM
spedler posted Sun, 23 December 2007 at 9:17 AM
The creator took the original colour map, then probably desaturated it and used some or all of levels, curves, and brightness & contrast to make the mortar dark and the bricks light to give the maximum illusion of height difference between the two.
Steve
Aioria posted Mon, 24 December 2007 at 8:31 AM
spedler posted Mon, 24 December 2007 at 1:47 PM
You're on the right lines. Looking at your original post again, I think the creator probably went over the mortar with the burn tool set to shadows and a fairly high exposure. That would explain why the mortar lines are so much darker. If you do that you should get the same sort of effect as the original.
Steve
Aioria posted Tue, 25 December 2007 at 9:14 PM
"a fairly high exposure" mean to use a Photohshop Plugin exposure,doesn't it?
spedler posted Wed, 26 December 2007 at 9:10 AM
No, no plugin - just select the burn tool, look in the top toolbar and you'll see two options - Range (choose Shadows) and Exposure (try 65% or thereabouts) and run over the mortar lines with a suitably sized round brush.
Steve
Aioria posted Wed, 26 December 2007 at 6:42 PM
amul posted Fri, 28 December 2007 at 5:46 PM
The difference between the red circled sections is the difference between specific processes. These detail variations are why we use homemade bumps.
At a guess, I would say that they decreased the overall contrast and then painted in the mortar with a black brush of some type. There are a variety of ways to do this, and all of them are equally valid.
For example, you could add a grey fill layer set to Color blending mode, or make the transformation with Curves or Levels. I could also do this with a Screen-mode curves layer. There are other methods, but these are sufficient.
It sounds like you're unsure of the reason you're doing this, the why which underlies the method. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but if I'm not, it would be helpful to you to learn this first.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then
explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of
the world....And when he had failed to find [wonder and mystery] in
things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked
imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions
to the illusions of our physical creation.
-- HP Lovecraft, The Silver Key
chris1972 posted Sun, 30 December 2007 at 8:01 AM
A good way to make bump maps if your using photoshop is to use the lighting effects filter.
Set the style to parallel directional, light type to directional, and adjust to get the effect you want. Set texture channel to blue or green and adjust height- flat to mountanous to get the intensity of the map you desire.
You must use an image with color info for this filter to work, then convert to greyscale after you have acheived the results you want. This method requires a little experimentation to get just what you are wanting. Sometimes if you are wanting are very subtle effect just a plain greyscale image will work.