The Good Show Studio Blog of all things!
What we’re working on right now
Written on December 8, 2009 at 4:12 pm, by Cassie
SO much going on at the moment, I just wanted to blog about it all, as it’s really fun.
We’re working on a website for a gallery in London called Sphere and it’s looking great. It includes a full CMS for adding new artists, pieces of work, news, exhibitions and gallery information. It promises to be a fantastic site and we will be helping Sphere to grow in the coming years, allowing them to sell prints online.
I’m also pleased to be working for one of my favourite clients, Vintage Hair Lounge. I created their logo and mood boards for their interior in the summer and we’re now onto printed material. At the moment, I’m designing vouchers and I’m loving it! See below for the mood boards and some of the voucher concepts I’ve been creating.
We’re also working on websites for Midland Assured (a property development company) , Warwick Physio and a blog about gender equality that promises to be a real hit. Lots of exciting things happening. We’re also looking forward to moving into our new premises in January!
Holga Effect in Photoshop – a tutorial
Written on September 6, 2009 at 10:07 pm, by Cassie
I had a look round on the internet recently for a decent tutorial on getting a Holga camera effect in Photoshop and although there were a few decent ones, I found I ended up using bits from each and adding a few touches of my own to get the best results, so I figured I would publish it here for you to take a look at.
1. Open up a suitable image.
2. Duplicate the layer for comparison later on.
3. Go to your “channels” tab and click on the “red” channel. Select all (apple+a) and copy (apple+c), then click back onto the RGB channel.
4. Go back to your layers tab and paste the layer in. It should appear in black and white. Make sure it is above your original layer image and set the layer style to “overlay”. This should make the image look really contrasty without bleaching out lighter areas or making it too noisy.
5. Click on the little black and white circle at the bottom of your layers palette to create a new adjustment layer and choose “hue and saturation”. Crank the saturation up. I tend to go for about +40, but it depends on your image. Make sure the adjustment layer is above all your other layers. Doing it this way means you can come back to change the saturation later if you want.
6. Choose the rectangular marquee tool and set the feather options to around 1/10th of the smallest side of your image. So, for example, my image was 3456px by 2306px. So, the shorter side is 2306 and about a tenth of that is 230px. Then, drag a rectangular selection over the entire image (doing apple+a doesn’t work for this). You should see that a rectangle with curved corners is selected. Now invert the selection (shift+apple+i).
7. Make a new layer and fill your selection with black and set the layer to “overlay” to create the famous dark edges of the Holga effect. You may then want to duplicate the layer to increase the effect.
8. Put all your current layers into a group together, then select all (apple+a) and copy everything from all layers (shift+apple+c) and paste it on top (apple+v).
9. Duplicate this new layer.
10. We’re now going to add a lens blur to the TOP image layer. Go to filter>blur>lens blur. Now, this top layer is going to be the outer edges of the image, which are always blurrier on a Holga image, so don’t worry about the quality at the moment. We want the edges to look quite blurry. For my image (which is pretty large) I set my radius to 18.
11. Now we need to take out part of this image, to reveal the non-blurry layer underneath, but we want to have the blurriness fading out towards the edges. So, take your circular marquee tool and give it the same feather value as you used before for your dark edges. Then drag a circle over the main subject of your image – if it’s a portrait, drag around the person in it for example. Then hit delete and this should reveal the layer below, which is not blurry.
12. Depending on the quality of the original image, you may also want to put a very slight blur on the image underneath too, so it doesn’t look too sharp. I used a radius of 8px on mine.
13. This last part is the part I think makes it feel really authentic. Holgas tend to distort the image slightly in a unique way. Select your top 2 layers and merge them (apple+e). Now go to edit>transform>warp. Pull the top two dots on either side down slightly, so that you are creating a curve to the image. This creates a real Holga-style distortion.
And there you are! Your image should now be Holga-fied.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
Cassie
Illustrating
Written on June 30, 2009 at 10:42 am, by Cassie
Been trying out some new illustration techniques recently and following my own advice about experimenting. Here’s an example of the results so far. I started out with this tutorial and then developed it further.
Getting out and getting creative
Written on June 26, 2009 at 1:46 pm, by Cassie
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about creativity and what makes us creative. To jump ahead to the end somewhat, I think experimentation is the key. Finding a new technique, style, or solution generally comes from doing totally unrelated things, like that moment in House where he figures out what the patient has while having a chat about life with Wilson. Our brains seem to work best when allowed to roam free, whilst keeping a note of our current issues somewhere in the background. As we go through our day, as we do different things, see different things, our brains are constantly searching for useful tidbits. They make new connections, add new bits of information to new categories and eventually, forge new ideas based on the new data. I’m sure we’ve all been there – you just can’t figure something out and the more you think about it, the harder it gets, but give yourself a break from the problem, allow some new input and some new connections to be made and the problem solves itself.
And herein lies the issue. To be a great designer, I think one needs the time to experiement, to browse the internet, to sketch, to mess around with illustrator and photoshop for hours on end, to pick out things they find interesting and put them on a wall and look at them; but time is always of the essence. When a difficult project crops up and inspiration is needed, it feels wrong to walk away from it and give yourself time off. It feels like skiving. You feel guilty for taking time out from your deadline.
If, however, you allow yourself this time for experimentation, guilt-free, you *know* that it will help, that your work will improve, that you will have happier clients. Guilt-free doodling and research time is an essential part of creativity and needs to be worked into a designer’s working day. Sometimes you just need to get away from your computer screen and see something new.
What we’re up to…
Written on June 21, 2009 at 10:28 pm, by Cassie
It’s a super-busy time for us at the moment, as we have some fantastic jobs on the go. We’re rebuilding a website for independent school Bablake, which we’re really excited about. Bablake are a really forward-looking school who want to make the most of the technology available and they want a site that will really showcase the school, so we’ve gone all out to make it visually striking, modern and slick, while still showing off the traditional values of what is essentially a grammar school.
We’re also about to launch a site for a team of business consultants and Ed has just finished development on a fantastic site – scaffoldingfrogs.com – which features a huge CMS and e-commerce system and was built entirely from scratch to the client’s specifications.
All this and we’ve even managed to launch our own site! We hope you like it. 