INTRODUCTION
We all love our media collection.
It’s easy to forget that not too long ago, we had to get up from our confy chairs and actually change the CD from the disc tray.
Nowadays, we can easily convert our albums to our favorite format, and enjoy an organized and aesthetically pleasing media library.
We do it primarily for ourselves, but it’s always nice to impress friends, who have absolutely no knowledge of media centers.
They’re eyes glow with amazement and you never felt so proud of your media library… until:
“Hey! There’s something wrong with the CD!”
As he was holding the CD, he compared it to the spinning cdart onscreen:
“The center isn’t black! It’s reflective!”
Immediately i tried to deflect the subject (pun intended).
He continued browsing my collection. Suddenly he asked:
“What’s that on the Metallica CD?”
Eventually i had to explain to him what is posterization, and why it is used to reduce file size.
On the black inner ring subject, i told him that, for some technical reasons, scanners interpret that highly reflective surface as black, or a very dark tone.
He paused. The inevitable question proceeded:
“Can you fix it?”
THE TUTORIAL
Now, the purpose of this fake story is to provide you with techniques in order to:
The tutorial itself consists of printscreens containing steps. Each step may have 2 or more parts, totaling 70 images. Though the number of images may seem excessive, i wanted this tutorial to be easy to follow by beginners, so please be patient. Even though some explanations may seem redundant, there is always someone who will appreciate them. Made with Photoshop CS4 and pc shortcuts.
Needed Files:
Optional Files: (For offline viewing)
Advantages in using this tutorial include compressibility (smaller file sizes without the need to use posterization); smoothness (instead of looking like someone else’s scanned cd, it becomes a common graphical representation of the cd); general appearance (blends better with your favorite skins).
If you have any questions/suggestions, please use the comments section.
Cheers.
Oh wow nice, lol
Just in time, thx
Nice one! You know I’ve done over 1300 cdarts and I’ve always hated making those reflective ones because of that darn dark inner circle. So thanks for this!
Wow, this is even better than my advice: use a selective blur on reflective discs in order to keep the colors down. Although that was mainly for discs that were ‘colorful’ and had irregularly shaped rings on them.
Although this is nice, there would be a better system. Ever noticed that if you rotate a CD around its axis, the reflection doesn’t rotate. Yeah, and all those skins rotate the full disk image, including the reflection. What would be far better is to only include the ink in the PNGs and let the application render the ink on the discs. This would give the most realistic image.
Thanks.
“and let the application render the ink on the discs.” You mean, let the app render the reflection on the discs. 🙂
Most applications already do that for posters, so i’m guessing that adding an overlay reflection and have a cd with a solid gray color rotating below it would look very impressive.
Unfortunatly we don’t have it (yet), so the point of this tutorial was to make the best with what we have now and deal with the black rings in the process.
I did try many different surfaces, and ended up with this one that’s pretty soft on the eyes when in rotation. Low saturation and contrast.
Well actually, the application would begin with a standard CD-R image like you can buy in the store (without the lines and brand name printed on it). It masks the images put here to the disk, and because all the images should only contain the artwork, not the redundant CD surface you give here, it can ‘paint’ it over the CD surface.
So to clarify, you improve the image by replacing the scanned CD surface by this nice surface. It would only be better if we removed the CD surface altogether because it’s redundant. So just create a largely transparent disk. The application can then create the full disk by taking your blank disk, and applying the image over it. This way, you won’t apply the reflection you mentioned over the full image, but over just the background. Which is more realistic because most inks don’t reflect that much.
And as a next step, because some inks do (more) reflection, you could specify a reflectiveness map to indicate that some inks can actually reflect.
But for some extra background information, you can look up the new image types thread in the forum, since I asked for this feature because I saw your post.
Wow, something I have always been looking for.
Is there anywhere in this tutorial also German, my english is not really very good.
But still, many, many thanks.
I suppose it some kind of reflection. maybe here you will find the answer http://fanart.tv/2012/11/reflective-cdart/