Straight away the tutorial sets up the Photoshop document and a method of guiding creation.The instructor used rulers to find the midpoint of the canvas and then made a circle to act as a guide for how big the ball of energy should be. This reflects the process of using guides and rulers to set up the DVD cover, meaning that most experienced users or professionals will employ these kind of techniques to help in creation. This could be a good sign of professional.
One new thing that I had never encountered was the extended brush options panel. In the tutorial, this was used to produce a jittery effect to later modify into a swirl. The shape dynamics settings in the brush panel was interesting because it alters the look and feel of the stroke, likewise scattering allows the user to place lots of dots instead of stroking a direct line. There is a lot of control given to the user as to how the brush stroke should look and feel which I didn't really know existed. I don't think I will be using many brush strokes in my DVD cover, but its interesting to discover some new techniques outside the scope of my task. The core effect of the ball of energy is the twirls that make up the composition in the ball. These swirls were achieved by applying a filter on the brush stroke which transforms the dynamically shaped stroke into a twirl. The instructor created more strokes by using the shortcut Ctrl + F to apply the previous used filter. This was interesting because during my creation process I hadn't considered using shortcuts but they heavily reduced the amount of tedious actions it takes to apply filters. One very useful shortcut that I learned was Ctrl + T, which bring up the transformation tools for the selected area/object. This will be extremely useful when trying to re-size and make small adjustments to my DVD cover in the future.
The center light is handled in a simplistic way. The center light is made with the brush tool, but to place it correctly in the center he used caps lock to change the circle cursor display into a crosshair. This is another technique that I had no idea was possible and it makes using large brush sizes much easier to use. To blend out the light a brush with a hardness of 0 is over-laid on top of the original center stroke. Hardness controls how much the brush blurs out into the surroundings. A hardness of 0 will quickly bleed out from the center, adding a glowing effect to the light.
The last technique I learned was the usage of layer blend modes. There are two different layer blends applied in this tutorial, colour dodge and overlay. Overlay is a contrast blend mode that ' both multiplies dark areas and screens light areas at the same time'.'(Photoshop Essentials, n.d.) This takes the rings and blends them to the same lightness as the twirls underneath, bleeding the colour together. Colour Dodge 'decreases the contrast to brighten the base color while reflecting the blend color'(Photoshop Essentials, n.d.), this makes it useful for lighting effects as it reflects the new lighting colour while maintaining some of the base colour, giving off an illuminated effect. The picture below shows just how good colour dodge can be at producing illuminated, fluorescent lighting.
I definitely think some of the things learnt from this tutorial can be applied in other area's of my work. Hotkeys can be used to greatly improve my efficiency when it comes to working in Photoshop and how to use filters and layer blend modes should come in handy when trying to improve the look of my DVD cover. The energy ball itself suits my scene quite nicely, matching to what I kind of envisioned in my mind.
There is definitely some concerns over the use of something created from a tutorial. The uploader of the tutorial hasn't placed any copyright over the image and because I understand how to produce the effect by scratch, its easy enough to make changes to avoid any copyright infringements. However, as I am producing the cover for study purposes, I should still include a reference to this tutorial with my DVD cover to ensure that proper credit is given even if the author himself isn't enforcing any copyright.
Ch-Ch-Check It, Nov 21 2012. Rasengan Ball of Energy Tutorial, [video online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx7X9ANlmh8 [29/04/2014].
Photoshop Essentials, n.d. The Overlay Blend Mode In Photoshop. [website online] Available at: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/layer-blend-modes/overlay/ [24/04/2014].
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