Update: Week 1

Hey guys! Sorry I didn't get to update you after my first day like I promised. This first week has been rough with the three hour time change, so I have been completely exhausted after work and I've been going to bed pretty early. I'd also like to apologize in advance for my photos for today's blog post; they are pictures of computer monitors (which are hard to photograph anyways) taken on an iPhone, so they're not the best quality but oh well.

You can't really see the path very
well, but it's there!

I had a really awesome first week working at Splash! Most of the first two days were spent learning how to make perfect paths with the pen tool. This is definitely a lot harder than it sounds. You have to first do a silhouette of the person or object you are working on, and the path has to be exactly on the edge of the object -- it can't allow any part of the background bleed through onto any part of the object, and vice versa. Then after you've made this first path, you go back and trace every piece of that object or person. I worked on a lot of football players, so after I made the first silhouette, I had to go back and trace the socks, jersey, pants, skin, helmet, undershirt, etc. Needless to say, the first part of starting an image is a lot of grunt work, but after doing this, you're able to work a lot faster and more efficient as you edit the picture. I am so slow at making paths right now, it's almost embarrassing. Darren keeps assuring me that I will get faster the more I do it, so I'm hoping that's true!

I spent the second half of the week learning how to make masks for anything in an image. This, too, probably doesn't sound like much, but there is a lot more that goes into making masks than I thought. First, Darren taught me how to make a really strong hair mask -- one that includes all of the little stray hairs that stick out into the background. He taught me several ways to mask off these hairs so that most of the detail was still there. By Thursday, he was showing me how to do masks that have blur on it -- this one is a little tricky because there can be so many different types/amounts of blur throughout an image that you have to go around the entire edge and match it all perfectly. I'm still trying to get this one down, but hopefully I'll pick it up pretty fast.

So it doesn't sound like I did very much this last week, but you have to get the basics down with anything before you can learn more advanced techniques. I'm in no hurry, I'd rather get things right and go a little slower than to do them badly at a fast pace. 

Anyways, this has been my update today! I hope you guys have a great week! More updates to come soon.