By: Jeremy Blye

Throughout my time editing pictures, I have found that many people have been interested in the photo editing process. I thought within this blog I would give some room to explain how exactly I have edited the headshots for the program and why it was done in this fashion.

 

 

In this unedited picture, you can see that there is a stunning young lad. I wonder who he may be. With this picture, it may look good right off the bat. There are some key elements of the picture that I see that could be improved on. When it comes to my “philosophy” of editing, I tend to like to keep things as natural as possible. This is photography and not art. Before I get too off track, I’ll get into the editing process.

 

The first step is usually changing the levels of the picture. With this tool, you can manipulate the brightness of the pixels in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. The extremes of each end are the complete black pixels and the complete white pixels. Luckily in the histogram (graph of the pixels), you can see that the brightness of the picture is well balanced. I usually find that I just need to increase the brightness of the highlights and the white pixels. That is what I’m doing here.

 

 

The next step is to add a little bit of saturation to the photo. It already looks decent, but adding in +3 to +6 in saturation helps the photo look just a little bit more alive once it is done editing.

 

 

After this, I like to change the vibrance a little bit. Adding in these little details that changes to photo very insignificantly help make the photo look that much better. Now that I have added in a small change to the vibrance, there are just a few more things that must be done.

 

Because this photo will be used for different media platforms, it is important to clean up any knicks on the face. I know, I know I said I like to keep the photo looking natural, but no one likes looking at any of the oil or acne on my face. It is a super quick edit that can be done with the spot-healing brush. Take a look:

 

Before:

 

 

After:

 

In order to get rid of some of the natural oils on my face, you can take the dodge and burn tool to darken the highlights on my face. Doing so helps the lighting look softer from the studio and the photo more crisp. In the end, the before and after photos have a decent difference and make it look that much better and more professional.

 

 

I bet you all thought it would be over from here. Funny thing, there is another step for the photos over here at DePaul. We need to cut out the bodies of each person and give them a transparent background. This allows us to use just the body of said person in any type of graphic with ease. It is also submitted into the league websites like EGF for their own use. 

 

In order to cut people out, you can use 2 different tools. Today, I’ll be using the color range tool. This allows us to select a specific color. In this case, we are selecting the green in the background. From here, we can cut out the green in the background and have a transparent background. Finally, I will save the image as a .png and go from there.

 

 

Overall, I hope you were able to enjoy this little walkthrough into the madness that helped get the picture days done here at DePaul Esports. I figured I may as well walk some people through it since many have asked me exactly what I do when I have been editing. Hopefully you got to learn something from this, and I hope to see you all in the center!

By: Jeremy Blye

 

As many of you know, we had our Welcome Back Bash last Tuesday. It was a way to help welcome back our community with a neat little kickback event. We had a bunch of Nintendo Switch setups, Sega Genesis setups, a Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl setup, pizza, free merch, and an amazing community to come support what we put on! Let’s take a look at what happened last Tuesday.

 

Throughout the 4 hour event, we had a pretty big audience show up that were both a part and not a part of the community. It was neat to see how we were able to attract people that were and were not a part of our community. Many people decided to stop on by because they heard all of the sick gaming music and sounds coming from the basement. We even had some Super Smash Bros. battles go on between our Varsity team and some fellow gamers that showed up to the event. There was some friendly banter between the competing parties, but it was fun to see both a competitive and casual scene come together and just have fun in the middle of the school year. On top of the banter in game, the concourse became flooded with everyone who was at the center once the pizza came in. How can you say no to free food?

 

That’s what I thought. It’s pretty hard to say no to free food, yet alone famous Chicago pizza.

 

As the event started to wrap up, we definitely had a lot of people help close out a wonderful day at the Esports Center. It was a day full of gaming, socializing, and fun times. We can’t wait to see you at more of our awesome DePaul Esports events. Be sure to stay caught up in our Discord servers and social media!

By: Jeremy Blye

 

Throughout the past couple of weeks, we have been able to knock out photo days, DeSmash Tournaments, Jerm on the Street filming, and just interacting with the community. It has been quite fun having everything back in person and putting names to people’s faces. One thing I want to mention is an interesting experience I have had in recent days. I fully understand the pain of trying to learn everyone’s name in an organization/team/classroom setting.

 

When I was younger, I never put too much thought into the amount of work leaders/teachers have to put in to be able to know everyone who they deal with. As I have gotten more and more involved with the Esports program, I am slowly starting to see just how difficult it can be to learn everyone who is in this community. I mean there are just about 1300 students and alumni that exist with us, so you can imagine how many people I can see on a daily basis.

 

During the first photo day, I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of new faces I was seeing. I got to a point where I was sometimes unable to realize someone that came in was someone I already knew. For example, Joey from the Rocket League team came in to get his pictures taken, and I had no clue that it was him who was in front of me. It was extremely weird to not even be able to recognize some of my friends due to the sheer number people I was meeting.

 

After the first couple of photo days and many days working as an employee, I think the coolest revelation I have had is my knowledge of names and faces. It is so cool to be able to know and recognize the many different faces that make up DePaul Esports. I know at this point you are all probably wondering why I am even talking about this subject. I just want you to think about this next point.

 

I may think it is fantastic that I am able to recognize the many faces of DePaul Esports. You may think that as well. In the grand scheme of things, I’m starting to realize how many people DePaul Esports affects. DePaul is a big school to begin with. We have over 23,000 students. The fact that our organization is over 1300 people is stunning. Within just a few weeks, I have been able to become introduced to virtually our whole competitive group(s) of gamers. I’m at a point where I can truly recognize and establish relationships with most of them. Considering we keep having a big influx of gamers every week, I am even more excited to see the amount of people that join our program. It is awesome to be able to see these types of things happening in my time here at DePaul. It only helps further my passion to be a part of this program and help it succeed each and every day. Each day, I hope I can continue to help out with this program, but until then, I’m here for the ride!