Bokeh, Texture Libraries and Photoshop Tutorials

In thinking about the matte paintings and other images that we’re creating and manipulating for The Red Machine, I’ve begun reading about bokeh, which is the ability of a camera lens to produce out-of-focus areas that guide the viewer’s eye by emphasizing certain areas of the image.

Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

I also came across this very nice website:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/

…which also includes an extensive list of tutorials (not specifically about bokeh at all — lots of general photographic tips and recipes):
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/

Next, looking for textures that I could use for paintings, titles and transitions, I found several very useful collections of free high-resolution textures:

http://www.mayang.com/textures/
Over 3400 free textures and images for artists to download and use. The only catch is that one can only download 20 textures a day — they track it by IP address, which you may be sharing with someone else. However, if you need a lot of textures all at once, you can also buy the entire collection for $50.

http://www.imageafter.com/textures.php
Another very extensive collection…

And finally, because I’m creating a few matte paintings to help establish scenes that take place at night, I went looking for tips on turning a photo from day into night, and I found this recipe for dong so in Photoshop:

http://www.effectlab.com/tutfullmoon.php

On top of this, I add a lot of lighting effects (which I’ll elaborate on in a later post), but I’ve found this does work well for the overall color/contrast shift.