Fan Extra members can gain access to 2000+ design resources, including vectors, brush sets, icon packs and textures, as well as weekly advanced Photoshop tutorials. New content is continuously added, making it a fantastic place for designer’s to find useful goodies and learn new tricks. Fancy giving their membership a try? Use the coupon code chrisspooner to receive 10% off any membership plan, including recurring payments.

Ink Photoshop Brushes

This premium pack of Photoshop brushes contains 10 high resolution ink brush strokes. Use them to create textured backgrounds or with the help of Photoshop layer masks to rough up and distress your designs.

Access All Areas members can download this pack as part of their membership. Don’t forget to use the coupon code chrisspooner at Fan Extra to get your hands on more handy design goodies!

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Adobe Premiere vs Final Cut Pro

When I first got started editing video on my Mac I used Final Cut Express, but I found the application pretty difficult to learn (plus it never seemed to support my footage!). I soon migrated over to Adobe Premiere and found it much easier to use, with many of the effects and tools having similar menu locations and names to those we’re all familiar with in Photoshop. While this tutorial is based on Adobe Premiere the same effects can be created in Final Cut Pro (or even Express), you’ll just need to dig through the menus to find the correct settings. For instance, Photoshop style blending modes appear under the Opacity menu in Premiere, but they’re known as Composite Modes in Final Cut.

How to Create Vintage Video Effects

So let’s get started with some vintage effects. To begin you’ll need to compose your clips to create your basic video sequence. In today’s example I’m using my GoPro footage from a horse riding session across the desert at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley. My video takes on a Western theme so old vintage effects will set the scene and give it more authenticity.

Video effects can be added to each clip individually, but it then becomes a painstaking task to make minor adjustments when each tweak has to be made numerous times. Create a duplicate of your sequence by dragging it over the “New Sequence” icon then add the word effects to its name. We can add the various adjustments to this single block of footage while still allowing for edits to the original composition.

Open the Color Correction folder under Video Effects and drag RGB Curves, Color Balance (HLS) and Brightness & Contrast effects onto the new sequence.

Under the Effects Controls open out the RGB Curves options and begin editing the curves profiles. These particular adjustments will increase the reds in the shadows and give the whole footage a warm orange tone.

Next, tone down the vibrancy of the colour adjustments with the Saturation option of the Color Balance (HLS) effect. -30% takes away the orange tones to create more of a vintage sepia appearance.

Footage can begin to look a little muted with saturation adjustments, so bump up the brightness and contrast to around +15% and +25%.

Just like textures really help create authentic effects in Photoshop, video resources can be placed over your composition to distress and age your footage. This simple grunge loop is part of a cool Film Damage pack.

By default the footage features black distortions against white, so add an Invert effect from under the Channel Video Effects, then change the Blend Mode to Screen under the Opacity settings to render the black background transparent. Don’t forget to click the little timer icon next to the word “Opacity” to disable keyframes.

Reduce the opacity of the clip to around 20%, then copy/paste a series of film damage clips across the whole composition.

Another video resource I always rely on is this pack of 50 Epic Film Burns. These are really useful for either creating additional textures and colour distortions or to create trendy light leaks and mimic the old film mishaps of analog cinema.

The first film burn in the pack is a mix of red and blue colours with dirty textures. Setting this file to Overlay and reducing the opacity to 20% adds some cool discolouration to the original footage, which is animated as the video plays.

The final vintage video effect

The combination of the sepia style colour correction and the various film damage resources really captures the low fidelity of analog footage. Here’s an example of these effects at work on my own video sharing our horse riding experiences at Furnace Creek Ranch.

How to Design and Print Custom Silk Screen Die-Cut Stickers

I’ve always enjoyed GoMediaZine’s illustration tutorials and walkthroughs. This latest post from Jeff Finley shows his process for designing a set of die cut stickers from the initial sketch right through to the various stages of print production.

35 Creative Single Page Portfolio Designs

Single page websites always include great navigation and layout ideas. This roundup from DesignM.ag showcases 35 fresh examples for a quick fix of web design inspiration.

Fullscreen Layout with Page Transitions

This recent post from Codrops presents a really cool responsive fullscreen website layout with fancy page transitions. The full source is available for free, so it could be a good base for your own portfolio design.

How to Design and Vector a Set of Character Poses

This brilliant post from Beto Garza on Vectortuts+ shows you how to design a really cool stylized character in Adobe Illustrator, then goes on to build various poses to create complete character animations.

Create a Heroic Firefighter Painting in Photoshop

While I’ve never mastered the techniques myself I’ve always loved admiring digital painting pieces. If you’re looking to learn how to create amazing artwork, this great tutorial from Psdtuts+ should really help out.

Imperfect Balance by Ursuleanu Daniel

Warrior by DKNG Studios

Sea Level by Jeremiah Shaw

Geometry Serie by Pablo Alfieri

GEO by Legan Rooster

Activities of the Inanimate by Andy Gilmore

Inadvertent Haiku by Nate Luetkehans

Halftone Polygons by Jesse Johanning

03-24-2010 by Andy Gilmore

Geometrical Landscapes by Marija Matovic

Animals Loose in NYC by Thomas Wilder

Z Geometry by Cesar Gomez

Architecture Polygons by Marcelo Simioni

Osservazioni by Daniele De Nigris

Vintalicious Poster by Andrea Sopranzi

Estampa Corrida by Douglas de Souza

Italian Cubism by Catarina Velosa

Walter by Julien Glad

∏∏∏ by Andy Gilmore

Poly Masks by Jean-Michel Verbeeck

Spiderman by Julien Glad

Geometric Animals by Deniz Ercelebi

MSCED by Marius Roosendaal

Solho by Paola Vertemati

Stolen Away by Allison Cruzado

Abe Sapien by James Olstein

Shapes of Cities by Yoni Alter

Wolf in Sheep Skin by Kevin Harald Campean

Stationery Design by Martin Filipovic

Eazy-E Typography by Jamison Reisbeck

The character we’ll be creating is a 50′s style greaser with slick pompadour, leather jacket and blue jeans. All the features of the character have to be extremely simplified to fit within the pixel grid, so it takes a little imagination to reconstruct your character with basic blocks.

In Photoshop if you zoom in far enough you’ll see the individual square pixels, but in Illustrator we’ll need to set up a grid to work from. Under the View menu option select the Show Grid option and make sure Snap to Grid is turned on.

Select the rectangle tool then draw a square within the major grid lines. The rectangle will automatically snap to the grid points, which will make it easy to achieve that perfect pixel alignment as we build up the character. Give this initial square a flesh coloured fill to represent the face of your character.

Switch the fill colour to black then begin constructing the hair using basic rectangle shapes.

Being restricted to basic block shapes makes it difficult to represent curved shapes, but things soon start to become recognisable as the blocks are built up.

Despite being a 2D design, simple perspective effects can be achieved with the use of scale. The left lens of the sunglasses is two grid blocks wide, whereas the right lens is three blocks wide.

Draw a large black rectangle to represent the body of the character. Overlap the rectangle with the head, but send the object to the bottom of the stack with the shortcut CMD+Shift+[.

Extend the head into the body by drawing another flesh coloured rectangle to represent the character’s neck. Build up the jacket by filling grid blocks with black to form a collar.

Draw two long rectangles to represent the character’s arms. Black shapes against black will blend together, so offset the shapes so they’re still recognisable.

Fill areas in the centre of the body with white to represent a white t-shirt under the jacket. Even though two shapes are aligned perfectly in Illustrator a visual glitch will show tiny hairline gaps. These lines don’t appear in the final exported artwork but you can avoid them by overlapping any same colour shapes.

Draw thin rectangles just one gridline in width and fill them with a dark grey to add some basic details to the jacket.

Construct the legs with moderately sized rectangles with a blue denim colour fill to represent a pair of jeans. Leave a considerable gap between the legs for the that goofy stylised appearance.

Use the same flesh colour to fill a few blocks to represent the character’s hands. Just one large block with a small thumb is enough to construct a recognisable hand shape.

Finish off the character with a couple of boots and two lighter blue rectangles to represent the turn-ups.

Head back under the View options and turn off the Grid to see the completed character. Being vector artwork it can now be scaled to any size while retaining its 8-bit pixel form.

If you’re feeling adventurous why not create a whole village of 8-bit pixel characters? The process is super simple and it just goes to show what kind of cool stuff you can create with the most basic of tools.

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Feeling nostalgic? Take a look at some of the previous anniversary posts:

• Blog.SpoonGraphics Turns 5 Years Old – Thank You!
• Blog.SpoonGraphics Turns 4 – A Look Back in Time
• Blog.SpoonGraphics Turns 3 – Win Yourself a Poster!
• Two Years of Blog.SpoonGraphics
• One Year of Blog.SpoonGraphics

A new look

The first big change you may have noticed over the last year is the complete overhaul of my site’s appearance. I talked about the redesign in more detail back in the complete overview post. I had the urge to rebuild the site for a number of years and after trying out loads of different concepts I found a happy place continuing the beige/brown theme but freshening it up with a new logo and layout.

Coinciding with the new design was the addition of the large banner ad at the top of the page. Considering I now run this site (along with my other ventures) as my full time job the extra income this banner alone generates is extremely useful and thanks to this slot being filled from just a few days after it was created my revenue has seen a healthy increase. When I look at some other design blogs I notice there’s plenty more revenue that could be had from various large sidebar banners and popup windows but I’ve always wanted to stay under the threshold of ad intrusiveness. Hopefully my small series of sidebar banners, this header banner and the content banner that only appears on old posts keeps me under this threshold.

Average stats of late

Average visits per day: 27,000 (up 4% from 2012)
Top Content: 50 Illustrator Tutorials Every Designer Should See (2009) & 10 Photoshop Actions to Create Instagram Style Effects (2011)
RSS Subscribers: 58,675 (up 1.5k from 2012)
Highest Traffic Peak: NEW RECORD! Thursday March 7th 2013 – 36,635 visitors (How To Make a Cool Cinemagraph Image in Photoshop)

It was difficult collecting data and comparing it to previous years now Google Analytics has been revamped and all the useful features removed, but it looks like traffic is still on the steady increase. It actually amazed me that I’d broken my all time traffic record, previously a photo effect tutorial from 2010 had top spot.

RSS subscriber stats seem to have increased again after the dip last year, but considering the impending doom of Google Reader it will be interesting to see how this compares next year, that’s if Google don’t also ditch Feedburner! 45,000 of my almost 60,000 blog subscribers use Google Reader, so if you’re one of them, now might be a good time to switch over to Feedly!

Technical stats

Powered by: WordPress
Hosted on: 2GB VPS
Server location: Chicago (Rackspace)

Thanks to my server admin buddy @davidsilburn my server setup has been given a complete overhaul too. Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace over the last year, which resulted in a big increase in my monthly bills. I took this opportunity to hire David to spring clean my server setup, optimise and bring everything up to date. It was definitely needed, the OS version my system was running on was prehistoric!

We’re now trying out a downgrade to a single 2GB server, seeing as since some recent optimisation the sites were only using 20% of the server resources.

One more thing…

It’s not exactly blogging related but Laura and I recently got married. We’re currently on our honeymoon doing a self-drive road trip from Las Vegas to Yosemite to San Francisco to LA. If you want to see our photos and videos from the trip keep an eye on my personal blog www.chrisspooner.com.

How to Design a Set of Video Game Character Poses

How to Create a Happy Drummer in Adobe Illustrator

Create a Character Mascot with Adobe Illustrator

How To Create a Minion Character From Despicable Me

How to Turn a Sketch into a Fat Cat Vector Illustration

Create a Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Bug Tutorial

How to Create a Character with Expressive Lines

How to Illustrate a LeBron James Cartoon Character

How to Create an Original Pin-Up Girl in Photoshop

How to Create a Cute Bunny Vector Character

How to Create a Killer Chainsaw Bunny Character

How to Create a Zombie Flesh-Eater in Illustrator

How To Draw a Pirate Character in Photoshop

Character Design for the Boomrock Saints

How To Create a Cut & Simple Hippo Face

Create the Face of a Grumpy Bear in Illustrator

Create Simple Cartoon Characters in Photoshop

How to Create a Vector Bilby Character

How to Paint a Furry Cartoon Character in Photoshop

How To Draw a Funny Cartoon Character in Photoshop

How To Create A Scary But Cute Monster In Illustrator

Create A Cute Creature Character From A Sketch

How To Design a Business Chick Character

How To Create a Monstrous Character in Illustrator

Create a Cool Vector Panda Character in Illustrator

How To Create a Cool Vector Yeti Character in Illustrator

How To Draw a Cute Vector Dog Character in Illustrator

Create a Simple Mechanic Character in Illustrator

FanExtra members can gain access to 2000+ design resources, including vectors, brush sets, icon packs and textures, as well as weekly advanced Photoshop tutorials. New content is continuously added, making it a fantastic place for designer’s to find useful goodies and learn new tricks.

Vintage vector frames

FanExtra has kindly donated one of their vector resources for Access All Areas members. This pack features 8 ornate vector frames, each carefully hand illustrated with cross hatch shading to achieve that vintage effect.

Access All Areas members can download this pack as part of their membership. Don’t forget to check out FanExtra for more handy design goodies!

Download the source file

Typical sepia toning of a photograph gives the image that classic orange/brown appearance, resulting in a much warmer atmosphere than the basic black and white alternative. Split toning on the other hand produces much more stark effects by creating unusual colour combinations. One popular technique is the bleaching of highlights with sepia, followed by the treating of the shadows with selenium to give a harsh mix of blue and yellow tones. The result is a cold and dejected mood which works great with photographs of abandoned ruins or urban exploration. Here’s an example of this effect applied to a photo from a friend’s exploration of Chernobyl. See more of his great shots of Dark Pripyat.

Split toning in Photoshop

Sepia/Selenium split toning effects work best with photographs that feature some kind of desolate scene in order for the dark blues to give the image a gloomy atmosphere. My buddy Ric kindly supplied one of his Dark Pripyat shots as the base for this tutorial.

The whole purpose of photographic toning was to inject some colour into a basic black and white image before the colour film was available. Therefore the first step we need to take in Photoshop is to convert our modern digital image to monochrome. The best way to do this without losing the image’s contrast is to click the “New adjustment layer” icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and select Black & White.

Add another Adjustment Layer, this time selecting Color Balance. There’s a few different ways to adjust the toning of your image, such as Gradient Maps or Curves adjustments on each channel, but the Color Balance option make it easy by allowing you to adjust the amounts of specified colours such as Yellow or Cyan.

Make sure the Preserve Luminosity checkbox is selected, then change the Tone option to Shadows. Increase the Cyans and Blues in the shadows to create the Selenium effect by moving the sliders to 30 Cyan and 40 Blue.

Next, change the Tone selection to Highlights, then adjust the sliders to represent the sepia tones in the highlights. This means moving the sliders to 25 Red and 35 Yellow.

The image has already been given the dark split toning effect, but final adjustments of the overall tone can be made using the Midtones sliders. Adding just an extra +10 Red helps warm up the sepia tones a little, or conversely adding more blue will enhance the coldness of the effect.

The split toning effect is complete, but I always like to sharpen up images with a quick High Pass filter. Press CMD+A to Select All, then go to Edit > Copy Merged. Paste a copy of the image at the top of the layer stack.

Go to Filter > Other > High Pass then adjust the slider until the details are subtly appearing from the grey background.

Change the blending mode of the high pass layer to Linear Light then reduce the opacity to around 30% to tone down the sharpening effect until it looks more natural.

The final sepia/selenium split toning effect replaces all the tones of the image with blues and yellows and creates a dark and gloomy mood which enhances this particular subject of an abandoned city.

Download the source file