Monday, August 22, 2016

Emperor George Palpatine


A commenter to the link from Drudge to videos of Trump rally attendees chanting at CNN camera crew, " Do Your Job" then "Tell The Truth" used these two images side-by-side and I thought, "That really is a remarkable resemblance." So I took it. 

The following is technical Photoshop, of possible interest to aspiring Photoshoppers. 

I'm really enjoying my discovery of the right way to to this, of discovering Adobe's intention. I never did fully understand why a stack of transparency layers must be transformed into a row of frames for an animation. Seemed to me all these years that the two are the exact same things, except layers is shown in Photoshop vertically and the frames are shown horizontally. Why not stick with one thing? But now I have seen the light, bink, and it makes all the difference in the world. 

See, bear with me on this, and you too will have this new understanding. The background layer is full Palpatine. The bottom layer in Photoshop. And the top layer is Palpatine again with his face feathered and cut out.

So that Soros' face can show through. 

Then intervening layers are Soros positioned between the two Palpatine layers, just so. Yet another temporary transparency I add for a white line that I draw from eyeball to eyeball. over Palpatine that helps align the picture of Soros. Plus another straight line for his mouth. The two photographs  match surprisingly well. Unusually well. No adjustment is necessary to get them to fit. But not exactly. My white line for eyes and white line for mouth assist in the best compromise. It's minor. Too minor to notice. That layer is discarded. 

Now the Soros layer is duplicated, then the two are duplicated, then the four are duplicated for eight layers of Soros' face. Ugh. 

The first Soros face layer is adjusted to 20% opacity, the next 35% opacity, the next 50% and so on up to 100% opacity of Soros over Palpatine, and sandwiched between Palpatine's empty face hooded cape. 

Now, up at frames, all frames are selected, and both Palpatines lawyers activated for all frames. So that's that. Now the frames are selected individually. The second frame already has both Palpatines and gets the first Soros layer activated, the third frame has both Palpatines plus the second Soros layer activated, and so on to full Palpatine background plus full Soros activated, and the top layer of Palpatine's hooded cape, cowl, or whatever that scary looking cloak is called.  

This saves on file size considerably because the only new thing for each frame is the bit that contains a different and increased opacity of Soros. When the animation runs, it's like both hands, layers and frames, playing three note cords gently on a piano, and not do, re, me, fa, so, banged out with one finger piano fortissimo as I had been doing all along. It's lovely.  

4 comments:

edutcher said...

It's not hard to make Dr Evil look that way.

He's 86 and a bad-looking one at that.

Another guy who colors his hair Dorian Gray.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Nice catch Chip. That you picked up on the sudelty of somebody else's work and add it to your pallate there.

chickelit said...

Just remember, Chip, that criticism of Soros is anti-Semitic. According to R&B.

ricpic said...

It's the diet of fetuses that keeps him going.