Roberto Blake Featured in Photoshop Creative 60

Hey everyone, I”m really excited about this post. I was recently featured in another photoshop magazine. Photoshop Creative recently started a Reader’s Gallery section and was kind enough to include some of my artwork in issue 60 of the magazine, which you can find at pretty much any book store in the magazine section or oder from their website. I can’t tell you how happy I am about tall the wonderful exposure my art has been getting lately.

As creatives we always seek some level of validation from our peers and the people who inspire us. We also have a desire to share our work with as many people as possible. In this way seeing your work published in a major venue is a great boost to morale for any artist or designer. The pieces selected were some of my own personal favorites.

Roberto Blake- Photo Manipulation Energetic

Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Touched

Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Catch U If I Can

Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Celestial Being

Time: 14 HRS
Tools: Photoshop, Wacom Intuos3 4×6

Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Touched

Touched was one of my images to be featured in Advanced Photoshop Magazine 67. It has always been a goal of mine to have my work featured in this publication so I was really happy about this.

Thanks to the OneOnSoftware.com plugin Genuine Fractals 6 I’m able to resize and recrop a lot of my work for different purposes. Everything from creating desktops, to prints! It really is an amazing plugin and well worth the investment to any graphic designer for the range of things it allows you to do with your images, all without a loss of quality. I decided to offer one of my favorite early Fantasy Photo-manipulations, Light Bringer, as a free desktop background.

The angel in the image is a stock image provided by Marcus J Ranum. His stock work is amazing and I suggest you check it out whenever possible. To download the wallpaper just right click on the image and select “save link as”.

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Roberto Blake | Typography | Graphics Design Is

Many designers, have and will continue to underestimate the amazing power and range of typography.
There are several reasons for this, but the reality is that typography is essential to a design skill set.
When stacked against photo-manipulation, digital painting, vexel artwork, and animation, the prospect of working with type, doesn’t sound all that exciting to most people.
Truthful, its because they don’t know any better.

All of the above mentioned techniques/skills can be incorporated into typography or used to balance it.
The range of design styles to which typography can be utilized is nearly unlimited, in fact there are very few designs that would not benefit from having typography introduced to them at some level.

So how can typography make me a better designer?
By getting used to the idea of conveying your message visually with type you can save yourself a lot of time creatively. The process for a design that uses a lot of photographic elements, or elements that are hand drawn, or digital illustrations is extensive. This does not even include the time it takes to develop inspiration or the process of experimentation. The work in editing and adjusting your images before you actually even start designing is very involved.

With type you can jump right into things without having to extract, adjust levels or curves, or work within alpha channels. The fact that if you’re working with Adobe Illustrator, all of your artwork is scalable and easy to reproduce, or move over to work with your other elements doesn’t hurt either.

Roberto Blake | Graphic Illustration | Magic Melody

Magic Melody
This image was something that came to me while watching the Brothers Grimm movie. I decided on the concept for a girl walking through the dark forest spreading enchantment with an instrument, then remembered the perfect stock image by Marcus J Ranum

Roberto Blake | Graphic Illustration | Paper Gangsta Girl

Paper Gangsta Girl
Like my other image Poker Face, Paper Gangsta Girl is an image inspired by a Lady Gaga song. For this image I wanted to combine certain effect in a subtle way.

I’ve seen this particular stock image used by digital artist in the past in a way that made me feel the effects took away from the image rather than complimenting what was already good about it. I tried to bring that feeling of movement and energy to the piece in a more minimalist way, while embracing a “hip hop” theme.

Roberto Blake Graphic Illustration Star Girl

Star Girl
Star Girl was interesting to work on, I used several effects here including one the required me to make a custom flare-brush set. This has since become one of my most popular images on both Photoshop Creative and Advanced Photoshop.

On September 23, 2008 Adobe® unvieled its latest suite of products including the much anticipated Adobe® Photoshop® CS4. Photoshop® CS4 and CS4 Extended, will be indespensible to Graphic Designers, Production Artist, and Photographers everywhere, from what we can see of its new features.

These new features include things like: Auto Blending of Images, Content Aware Scaling, as well as Revolutionary 3D Painting and Compositing

So many of you may be wondering if the announcement took place on the 23rd when can we all look foward to CS4? Adobe announced that they will be releasing Creative Suite CS4 on October 15 of this year, which means that we are officially 4 Days from CS4 now!

Earlier I mentioned some of the new features of Photoshop CS4, now I will explain some of what this will mean for users.

Content Aware Scaling
Content aware scaling will  automatically recompose an image while its being resized, and will preserve vital areas as the image adapts to its new dimensions, meaning that Graphic Designers will be able to final for the most part “Design Once“. If you’ve ever had to make a banner ad package, and alter some of your elements to conform to various dimensions while preserving most of the look and feel, you can appreciate how much time this new feature will save you.

Auto Blending of Images
This is a dream come true for Photographers and designers a like. Finally an easy way of naturally combining images without having to worry so much about how to smoothly blend the color and shading of various images, and in this case it even allows us to alter the focal point easily, and alter depth of field.

Like many of you I will be downloading the trial of most of the Creative Suite Products before putting in my order, to figure out which Creative Suite Bundle is best for my projects (and my wallet!) I will be posting my reviews on the individual features and merits after the October 15th release.