Beginner's/Intermediate tutorial: Coloring lips and eyes

Yay first photoshop tutorial evar for my blog!

Aight so this tut is for semi-newbies and some intermediates. Hell you could even be an advanced user and not know, so check it out and lemme know how awesome or stupid it is, or add any step that you want.

So what do you need to know in order to do this tutorial? From now on, all tutorials will list the prerequisites and goals.

Prereqs:

1. Know how to open photoshop

2. Know how to start a new document and paste images into it

3. Know how to use the brush tool

That's it! I will cover all the rest. But of course, you need to friggin practice. If you don't practice, you ain't gettin nowheres. Aight? Aight.

Let's get started.

First open photoshop, no not porno shop. Photoshop. There thats right.

Then open your favorite browser and find a picture to edit the lip color of and eye color of. Black and white works or color pictures work. 

I found this image of a lovely woman. Credit to Aldin. Link to the image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/918642

Since this is a black and white image, it might default to grey mode for coloring. Make sure you're in RGB mode. To do this, click on "Image" at the top, and then go to mode and then make sure "RGB color" is checked. Click on it if it isn't checked.

Ok, let's start working on lip color. Click on the yin-yang icon at the bottom of your layers pallette. I've marked it with a giant friggin red arrow, so you won't miss it :).

Next click on "Hue and Saturation".

Click on "colorize" at the bottom right, that will color everything with that hue.

Now play with the sliders. Hue will change the color (red, yellow, blue, green, etc), saturation will control.... saturation (aka the amount of colorization) and lightness will control basically the ending brightness/intensity of said color. Play around with it. I used the following values for my lip color.

Now click "ok". You'll notice that everything is colored. Don't panic. Check your layers tab, there should be a hue and saturation layer now. Next to it is this white square. Click on it. That's your layer mask. Basically right now its filled with white, which means allow the layer to be visible everywhere. If you filled it with black, that means that the layer will be visible nowhere, aka essentially invisible. 

We don't want either, but for right now, fill it with black. To do this, click the layer mask first and then make sure your colors are Black and white in the foreground and background. If it's black in the foreground, then press ALT + DELETE. Not backspace, but DELETE. If black is your background color, then press CTRL + DELETE. Sorry mac users, but since I use a PC, I forget what the keys are for mac. Probably swap alt with command/apple key.

Now, nothing is visible. Take out your brush by hitting the b key. Right click anywhere on the canvas and this brings up your current brushes. Choose one that has soft edges. Why? Because it's smoother and sexier and not very blocky. The last thing we want is blocky looks. I chose the following.

Now what you'll be doing is painting in white over the lips to reveal the color on it. To do this, make sure your in the layer mask first of all, then make sure white is your foreground color. If you don't have black and white in your FG/BG (foreground/background), then hit the "D" key. This will reset it to B&W. To swap between white in the FG and black in the FG, hit the "X" key. this makes life easier. One more shortcut involves changing the brush sizes. To decrease the size, hit the "{" key (aka SHIFT + "[") and to increase hit the "}" key (aka SHIFT + "]"). Brush along the lips, making sure to avoid teeth (if there are any), hair, and painting outside the lines. If you make a mistake just swap colors and paint. Easy huh?

Once you're done it should look like this. 

Now you'll want to set a blending to this. You don't have to but it looks much nicer once the color has been blended into the photo. I set mine to the following settings.

That's looking great! Now let's do the eyes! How do we color the eyes? Same steps of course! Open up the ying yang, click hue/saturation. Then select a blue color. This is the setting that I used. Make sure you have "Colorize" checked!

Next fill the layer mask for that with black as before. Now paint in the eyes. Zoom into the eyes by pressing the "Z" key, and then drawing a rectangle over the area you want to zoom in (using the mouse). 

Next start brushing in white as before. Careful not to go outside the lines. Then once you're all set with that eye, work on the other. Once you're done with THAT, set the blending so that it looks a little nicer. I merely set mine to normal and reduced the opacity to 85. You can change it if you'd like or leave it. It's upto you.

Then you can do some additional things as well. I smoothed out the edges of the lips by making a new layer at the top of the layer pallette, and then pressing the following keys all together "CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + E". This creates a layer that adds up all the previous layers together. The step is actually called "Stamp Visible" in the history. I then went to filter, blur, gaussian blur, and set a blur to about 1 pixel. I then put a layer mask by clicking the circle inside a square icon, directly to the left of the yin-yang icon. 

I then filled it with black. Then I painted white over the very edges of the lip coloring. This way its smoother than just leaving it alone. I finally reduced the opacity to around 80%, giving it this final look.

I hope that helps some of the newbies. Check back for more tutorials!

Daily 1,2,3, and 4: Killing 8-15 scourge while summoning a dark messenger and other stuff

So head to the Argent Tournament, which is labeled #1. I'm going to be referring to these numbers so check that image again if you need for a reference.

You're going to pick up either 1 or 2 quests here at argent. Why 1 or 2. I say this because it depends on whether you're a champion or not. I am a champion for undercity (since I'm an undead mage), so I have 2 quests that I want to take here.

One of them is A Valiant's Field Training and the other is Taking Battle to the Enemy.

For these quests you have to kill a certain number of scourge in Icecrown. Really? Kill less than 20 mobs for gold? Hell yes I accept!

For those who don't know, the first quest is in this tent circled here:

The 2nd quest is located here:

You're also going to want to pick up some quests from Orgrim's hammer. So That should be around location #3. Fly around until you find the ship, which looks like this:

Grab whatever dailies are there from everyone that is available to you. I grabbed Not a Bug, Drag and Drop and a few others that were available to me. I will post about them later. Let's just worry about these 4 for now.

Head over to Aldurthar, which is marked #3 on that map I linked you. We're going to be heading specifically over to here:

We're going to be killing these guys:

Specifically the item you want to grab is from the Voidwalker, but you can't avoid killing his buddy there. As a mage, what I tend to do is polymorph the buddy (so that he's out of the way)

And then proceed pwning the voidwalker. Usually takes me 2 shots to down it, sometimes 3. Then you want to use the quest item on the corpse of the Voidwalker. 

This will give you 1 dark matter. You need to collect 5 for the quest, so you have to kill 5 other VWs (voidwalkers, not volkswagons). They are spread around this platform here, and if you're doing this quest all by your lucky self then you should have at least 6-7 of these floating around which is more than enough for the quest. One MAJOR caveat here is that if you kill 2 sets of voidwalkers next to each other, you'll only be able to acquire 1 dark matter. It's a glitch on Blizzard's part. When you attempt to grab the other one, it will just say "entering combat" and then it'll be a fizzle. So try to make sure theres a little bit of a distance between the mobs. If you have to take 2 on, finish 1 of them off, then kite the other one to another safer location. In any case, once you've collected all 5, you can summon the dark messenger here by clicking on the purple crystal:

Now for 3 daily quests completed in 1 go. In this same area where you summoned the dark messenger, you're going to want to kill a whole bunch of the mobs in that area. Basically classified as cultists in Aldurthar, they drop a certain item 100% of the time that you need to collect 10 of and then combine to make a writhing mass and send it flying into a cauldron. So you have to kill 10 of these guys.... and they're also considered scourge. Bwahahahahaha. And that's how you complete 3 quests in one go. Let's go over them.

First off you need to drink the following item that you get from accepting the quest:

Then you'll want to kill these bastards:

Who drop:

Kill about 6 of them or less (depending on however many you can find) and then head down the stairs towards the cauldrons (which is the final spot for the quest):

Kill some more guys until you've collected 10 tainted mass. Then you can combine them to make:

Stand near a cauldron, and toss it in. Congrats you've finished that quest. Now kill 5 or however many more you need for the Argent tournament quests, and then call it a day. You've just made 52.92 gold from quest rewards without breaking a sweat!

K time to take a break. I will continue with more dailies later on! Stay tuned!

25 Daily Quests

So, if you've ever played WoW, you know the frustration of trying to earn gold. Gathering professions are definitely one way to do so, but leveling some of them takes FOREVER (herbalism). Some take less time (skinning) but don't give you much in the way of cash money hoes.

Another way to make money is to farm. And that might be just your thing. You might like sitting in one area, killing the same friggin mob over and over again for an hour just to loot 45 silver and a bunch of trash items worth 2 copper at the vendors.

I however like to do dailies. They take an hour to an hour and a half to do all 25, and are the quick and easy way to make gold. In fact, at maximum level (80), you should be getting around 13 gold 23 silver per quest (excluding vendor trash). That means for 25 quests, you should net 330.75 gold. Not bad!

So I'm going to outline the 25 quests that I do at maximum level to earn my keep. Though I never seem to keep a hold of it for a long time, I do make some pretty good cash from them.

I'll go over each of the 25 quests in their own separate blog, as taking screenshots and explicating will take some time.

Look forward to them.... whoever's reading this. Saorise.... poor girl.

Test blog

Hello world! This is a test blog, just to test various functions out. Here, here are some stuffed animals for y'all to stare at while I put stuff in bold and in different fonts and generally bore you about what this blog will subsist on. 

Trebuchet

Georgia

Lucida

Arial

Courier

I think trebuchet looks best huh?

So I like to photoshop, and I like to play World of Warcraft (WoW). Isn't that fascinating? Well I decided I would make a nice little blog site where I could post tutorials, daily/weekly/monthly creations, as well as stuff about WoW and how life is there. I thought I would make some guides as well to help neeewbs along and get into the end-game material.

So that's what this blog is all about. Helping others, sharing my knowledge of PhotoWoW. World of shop. Phorld of Shopcraft.

Enjoy and stuff will come soon.