Post #682868 by Gene S Morgan on Wed, Jun 19, 2013 7:19 PM

This is pretty much the final image. The thing that separates digital art tools from traditional tools is that you are never really finished. By that I mean that there are many other tools and programs that can actually change your image in very radical ways. This is the main beef that traditional artist have with digital. The idea that you can make the image look different without any additional painting seems wrong to many of them. I can understand that concept because it seems that you can get results without your own creative input. But, to me it is just using more tools. Like all tools, you have to know how to use them to get the results you want. To me tools are tools. Paint brushes and pixel manipulating software are both tools to create an image. It depends on an imaginative brain to make those tools work.

This is an example of another app that's purpose it to add effects to an image. In this case I manipulated what is referred to HDR (high dynamic range) effect. The dynamic range consist of color and contrast elements of an image. You can see a radically different image can be produce with a few simple adjustments.

I mentioned earlier that I was not satisfied with the woodgrain effect I had used on my tiki. I have grown to like this tiki and decided he might work for a t-shirt design. I moved the image to my computer so I could do a little Photoshop magic on it. There are many effects filter you can use with Photoshop and other graphics programs. There is a program called Filterforge that is a tool for designing your own filters. I have created almost 100 such filters for special uses. This tiki surface treatment is from a 3D surface filter of mine. It is meant to imitate rough wood carving.

A closeup shows what looks like tool marks and chips, much better than the original wood grain.

Just for fun I added a background using another effects filter I created …... Well folks I think I'm done … Thanks much for taking time to check out my rambles here. My only goal was to demonstrate some things that I have learned and encourage others to try to create their own tiki art. Hope I was somewhat helpful ….

I started this series of post with this image, but that was so long ago. I did some more filtering in Photoshop to improve the color and saturation. I used another HDR filter to do that. I also decided to use the image without a background. That makes the image stand out better when printed.