It’s helpful, it’s fun, it’s just GREAT!
Whether you are fed up with your marriage (and/or life) or you just want to learn some new Photoshop tricks, you should check out the tutorials of Donnie Hoyle. This desperate guy has a tutorial series called “You Suck at Photoshop”:
Lesson #1:
This week I made some designs for my Mahjong game (read more) and the game is gonna be just great! Here is a little preview of the tiles and the style of the game (I’ll upload more designs later on):
Besides the designs I also needed a nice transition between the background and a map that will be shown somewhere during the game (as some sort of level selection). Because the style is kind of “old” I thought it would be a good idea to make some sort of dissolve transition.
Whaddayaknow; I managed to get a decent result in just a couple of hours.
Despite the fact that I used a perlinNoise and a copyChannel the result runs pretty smooth. Check it out:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080201.htm
To accomplish the dissolve effect I used an alpha mask on the top image (in this case the “map”-image). The mask itself is created by combining a perlinNoise and copyChannel. The perlinNoise creates the randomness and the copyChannel transforms the randomness into a transparent layer.
The size of the mask is half the size of the image and stretched to match the size of the image. This way only a small perlin noise has to be created which increases performance.