P#44: The Old Red Truck, She Ain't What She Used to Be

Using the Alpha Channel: The Old Red Truck

Bert Monroy: The Red Truck is another one that's very organic looking. Again, most of the detail is just a lot of wear and tear on the body of this old truck. That was made really easy because of the fact that I was working directly on the screen with a very fluent brush that I could just move my hands around, and make it very freeform looking. (click the image for a larger version)

Audri Lanford: Very interesting. That also has some fascinating reflections.

Bert Monroy: Those reflections are a little tighter, for instance, on that headlamp. There's a lot of fine detail. That wasn't all as free as some of the other rough and stuff on the chrome. That was just a collection of things like alpha channels, like all those little crystals, all these little separations on that headlamp.

If you're on the side and look at it, you'll see that the headlamp has all these little divisions. That's an alpha channel trick. That's a place where if you look closely, you'll see that there's all these little blocks and they all have little rounded edges. That would be very tedious to create all those little rounded shapes.

What I did, and this may sound a little convoluted, but in the long run, it's really easy, in an alpha channel, I created a bunch of path, vertical and horizontal, that represent all the lines for those little shapes. I then stroked those paths with a sharp brush, a nice white brush which made all these little white lines.

Now, like I said last week, where it's white, it's where things are going to happen. Where it's black, it's protected. I have all these white lines in this alpha channel. I then blurred those white lines. In blurring them, the intersecting parts which are sharp suddenly become rounded, become soft.

Now I have all these nice soft rounded edges. I needed them to be sharp. Then I went into level. This is all in the alpha channel by the way. I started playing with the white and the black sliders, brought them in towards the mid tone. The closer they got, the sharper the lines became.

Now if you push the black slider too far, these lines are going to become real thin. If you move the white slider, the lines will become really wide so I just found common ground where the lines were a thickness that I wanted.

Once I got them to that point, then I pushed them as close together to the mid point slider. I got perfectly sharp lines that had rounded corners. Then once I had that alpha channel, I loaded that onto the canvas, and in the layer, I filled that with a nice gradient.

There were all the little divisions that I needed that would be then inside those little shapes. I would add the other colors that made up the glass inside, but that's how I got all those little details. There are a lot of alpha channel tricks that went into creating that headlamp.

To Sum Up

We can do amazing things with technology these days, but sometimes even the best photographers aren't aware of exactly how powerful that technology is. In this painting of an old red truck, Bert Monroy shows how software tools can create an image that is, simply, stunning.