Jane Jacobs: The Life and Death of Great American Cities

5th Avenue New York City

In Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she discusses the particular nature of cities. The introduction focuses on how City Beautiful and the Radiant City differs from how cities truly work and how cities have suffered as a result of these ideals.

Part 1

In part one of her book she discusses city sidewalks at length talking about how safety, contact and how they work to assimilate children. She talks about three specific attributes that a street must have to create safety. A street must have a clear separation between public and private, watchful eyes of storekeepers, residents and those passing by and a sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously. The prerequisite to surveillance is a “substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the sidewalks.” This gives people a reason for using the sidewalks and also draws people past private places while keeping them well traveled. Storekeepers also help to keep order and peace while their establishments help to attract people and increase the numbers of people on the sidewalks. Lighting is also a very important characteristic of safety, though without effective eyes to see, crimes can occur in even well lighted areas.

The social structure of the sidewalk hinges partly on so called self-appointed public figures. One whom is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people such as storekeepers. They essentially enhance the  social structure by learning news at street level and spreading the information. She argues that this type of trust can not be established in community rooms. Rather, trust can be created with sidewalk contact and safety.

Jane Jacobs, 1962

The third function of the sidewalk is to assimilate children, that is to provide a non-matriarchy environment in which they can play. This section I found the most interesting when she compared the supposed ‘unsafe’ sidewalks with the presumably ‘safe’ parks. She referred to documentary maker Charles Guggenheim and his film investigating a St. Louis day-care where he discovered that roughly half of the children didn’t want to walk home afterwards, while the other half did. Those that left willingly lived in the old ‘slum’ streets whilst those that did not want to leave lived in the projects. Jacobs argued that those that lived in the projects had to deal with bullies while those that lived on the old streets were safe from extortion since those that lived in the projects had to pass by the presumably ‘safe’ parks in which had been removed from the public eye thus rendering them unsafe. Those living in the old streets had the opportunity to circumvent trouble unlike those that walk to the projects. She went on to talk about parks and how parks should posses four characteristics: intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure. Intricacy is the reason thereby people use parks. Every park should have a center. Every park needs sun and buildings should be built up to the park without any windowless walls.

Part 2

In Part Two, Jacobs discusses that human beings live within a community that is characterized by many layers that seem chaotic and planners like Moses use deductive reasoning to find principles to dictate principles by which to plan cities thereby taking out the human portion of the equation. Urban renewal is the separation of uses like residential, industrial and commercial from each other thereby decreasing diversity of cities. Districts must serve mixed use functions to activate the streets at different times of the day. Blocks must be short to increase pedestrian path options and as a result enhance social and economic development. Buildings should also be of different ages so that they might be able to support businesses and residents of different wealth and also there should be a dense concentration of people to provide eyes on the street.

Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses

Book

Jane Jacobs' book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a fantastic read and a great addition to your library. It is a truly insightful book on the inter-workings of cities.

Additional Information

The City Builder Bookclub - Great insight into each section of the book.

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

William H. Whyte (1917-1999) was an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher.After writing a book about corporate culture, he started to research human behavior in urban settings. He wrote many books on the subject as well as created the following video on the social life of small urban spaces. Released in 1988, this witty and original film documents the research him and his researchers performed on social interactions within the city mainly looking at which spaces work and which ones do not. Starting with New York's Seagram Plaza the film analyzes why the space is so popular and compares them to other open areas in New York and other cities. This film is an engaging tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be transformed into a more habitable place for the urban dweller. The following video is a small fragment from his original documentary, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a must see for any urban designer or architecture student.

Additional Reading

After completing the documentary of the social life of small urban spaces, Whyte wrote a follow up book by the same name as the video, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. A great resource for urban research.

Learn How To Create Colored Eagle Manipulation in Photoshop

Learn How To Create Colored Eagle Manipulation in Photoshop:

In this tutorial you will learn how to create colorful effect in Photoshop. We will use few stock images and shapes. We will go through the process how to add to an object light effects using basic Adobe Photoshop tools. Photoshop techniques that you’ll learn in this tutorial, you can use in creation of advertising posters or creating your own stylish photo effect.



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Final Image Preview



Stocks Used
Eagle Stock
Color Stock
Circle Shapes

Step 1 – Creating a new file

First create a new layer with w:2560px and h:1600px with color:000000 (black), name this layer as “Background”.

Step 2 – Place the image of bird

Open the image of bird and place in your document. Place the image in the middle of the document. Name this layer “Eagle”.



Step 3 – Preparing to the main effect

Create a new folder below the eagle image and name this folder “Lights effects”. We’ll create the main effect of this tutorial. Now choose brush tool (press b) with a soft round brush color e20000 and 1000px size paint in the middle of your document and use hard light to blend mode. Create a new layer below this layer and again use a soft round brush but now with 500px size and use color white. See the images below.







Step 4 – Add more color

Add more color to your document. Just create a new layer and use a soft round brush with 1000px color 832380 and place like the example below.



Step 5 – Creating circular shapes

We need more effects. Let’s create some circular shapes using the brush tool (b). Use a hard round brush with different sizes and colors to do this. After creating the circle press ctrl and click on the circle with the layer to create a circular selection. In a separate layer add a stroke (Edit >Stroke) with a lighter color and 4px or 5px. Return to the first circle shape and add a Filter>Blur>Gaussian blur, with 7px or 8px. Now, in the stroke layer add the same effect but now with 3px or 4px blur. Then marge both layers together. I created more circles and erased some areas. Look the images below.





Step 6 – Using liquify filter

Still in the lights effects folder create a new layer and use a yellow brush (b) then apply Filter>Liquify, and use forward warp tool to create a distorted shape like images bellow.



Step 7 – Adding more stock

Now I used a image of stock to add more lights effects (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=mmmm6fkg). Resize the image and change the layer mode to screen. Mask or erase some areas if necessary.





Step 8 – Creating splatter effect

Create a new layer above the eagle image then use any splatter brush to create this splatter effect. With your splatter brush paint over the eagle image, then press ctrl+click in this splatter layer to load a selection. Go to eagle image and press ctrl+c to cut and ctrl+v to paste this selection in a new layer. Now you can delete the original splatter layer, we do not need this layer.







Step 9 – Creating circular line shape

Create another layer above the eagle image. I created a circular line shape to do this simple effect. You can download this pack containing the shapes here (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=73gm7gs1). Now, just draw a shape like the image below. I use color #ff006c with overlay mode and 15% opacity.





Step 10 – Creating abstracts shapes

Create another layer above lights effects folder. Time to create some abstracts shapes. In this step I used some renders stock then I simply use liquify tool to distort the renders (Filter>Liquify>Forward warp tool). I don’t remember where I found the stock renders, but you can easily find these stock in Devianart. See below how were the renders after liquify tool. Use hue saturation (ctrl+u) to adjust the colors if necessary and burn tool (o) to darken the colors.



Step 11 – Apply a light effect on the wings

Now I create another layer above the eagle image. I will apply a light effect on the wings. To do this i draw i line with pen tool (p) and apply a layer style as you can see below, use outer glow with color #ab023a and let others settings standard. Then to finish the effect i apply a Filter>Blur>Motion blur, angle 0 and 10px or 15 px. See image below as reference. Do the same in the other wing.





Step 12 – Creating more lines

Create another layer and use pen tool (p) again to create more lines, but this time without layer style applied. Just use white color and choose simulate pressure. Choose a hard round brush 2px then press (p), right clickselect simulate pressure and hit OK.



Step 13 – Creating pink circles

I create in a new layer more pink circles and then I apply a Gaussian blur effect (Filter>Blur>Gaussian blur) with 5px. Then I have grouped all this circles together. Use soft light to layer mode and reduce the opacity to 20% or 15%. See the image below again.



Step 14 – Adding typography

I just use Illustrator to create a simple typography. Use type tool in Illustrator and add Effect>3d>Extrude & bevel and use the standard settings as you can see below.





Step 15 – Last step – Adding additional effects

For the last step feel free to create additional shapes and effects. I just paint some blue small dots with brush tool (b) and also I create some triangular shapes and I put diagonal lines to finish this job.

Thats all folks, hope you all enjoy it.

Final Result: Colored Eagle Manipulation in Photoshop

How to skin retouch with photoshop

How to skin retouch with photoshop

Duplicate the background image and rename it to Layer 1.

Go to Filter > Other > High Pass and set the Radius to around 4.5 pixels.

Change the Blending Options for Layer 1 from Normal to Soft Light and uncheck the eye to make Layer 1 invisible for the next step.

Duplicate the background image again and rename it to Layer 2. We’re creating an extra layer with an automatic smoothening underneath the skin, so pop it under Layer 1 and go to Image > Adjustments > Invert. Next go to Filter > Other > High Pass, set it to 4.5 pixels and for this layer change the blending options toOverlay. After doing this you can make Layer 1 visible again.

As you’ll see the image will be just slightly blurred and smoothen out but not the edges. On Layer 1 continue retouching using the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Circle the areas inside the face that need quick fixing, go to Filter> Noise > Median and max the pixels out to 100 pixels. To make the process faster, repeat process in all areas using Ctrl-F (Command F on the Mac). This is a shortcut to apply the last filter which just makes life so much easier for you. I would suggest applying the Median effect as much as you can before you move on to the next step.

Flatten Image and use the Clone Stamp Tool mixed with a Soft Brush with the Flow set to around 30% to manually select areas next to one another, blend it in as much as you can using this tool to make further improvements to the skin. (The Clone Stamp was used no more than 10 times in the example below to show you how smooth it can go).

If you find that it is getting too smooth for your liking then its really up to you to take a step back, use less Clone Stamping and re-size the brush correctly. This is just a quick demonstration to give you guys an idea of how to quickly clear up skin, with more time, effort and of course accuracy you will get a much better result.

This is an additional step that you don’t need to follow, I just threw it in to add that extra bit ofshadow to overall image. Go to Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight, then set the amount of Shadow to 20% and the Highlight can be left on 0.

via: http://photoshopland.com

Photo Manipulate a Magical Shoe House Scene

Photo Manipulate a Magical Shoe House Scene

Photo Manipulate a Magical Shoe House Scene

Resources Used In This Tutorial

• Cloudy Sky
• Grassy Field
• Old Boots
• Roof Image
• Door
• Bell Photo
• Chimney
• Wooden Beams
• Big Ben Clock
• Circular Window
• Door Mat
• FanExtra Premium Brush Set: Clouds
• Free Grass Brush Set
• Girl Sitting
• Girls Running
• Red Balloon

Final Image

Here is a preview of the image that we are going to be creating:

Step 1

Create a new document (900X900px).

Open the ‘cloudy sky’ photo in the resources section for this tutorial.

Paste the sky into the top part of your canvas. I used the transform scaling box to make the height of this sky a little taller, filling more of the canvas:

Apply a color balance adjustment layer, being sure to give you adjustment layer a clipping mask. (Apply a clipping mask to all adjustment layers unless otherwise specified).

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: -21 / +4 / -6
Midtones: -39 / +16 / -18
Shadows: -21 / +15 / +5

Step 2

Open the ‘grassy field’ image from the resources section for this tutorial.

Paste the image into your original document and position it at the bottom part of your canvas:

Apply a layer mask and use a soft, black paintbrush to mask off the top of your grassy field image. The idea is to let it look as if the underlying sky image is the actual sky for this scene.

Be sure to keep the sign post area in tact and don’t mask this off:

Apply a levels and color balance adjustment layer to your green field layer:

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings:

19 / 1.00 / 236

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: -16 / -8 / -26
Midtones: -22 / +4 / -4
Shadows: -4 / +26 / -25

Step 3

Open up the ‘old boots’ image from the resources section for this tutorial. Cut out one of the boots using your preferred selection method and paste it into your original document, positioning it like this:

We want to get rid of the large lace hanging down the side of the boot. You’ll also notice a small light patch on the bottom left of the soul. This was the second boot in the original image, and we want to get rid of this area too.

Use the clone stamp tool to clone over these areas. Start by option+clicking on your boot layer to select it. The marching ants active selection around your boot will mean that non of your cloning efforts will go outside the edges of your boot shape.

Then proceed to use your clone stamp tool like normal to clone out areas of your boot:

You can see the result of the cloning process below. I also applied a layer mask and masked off the top of the boot using a large, soft black paintbrush (you’ll see why later in the tutorial):

Apply a levels and color balance adjustment layer to your boot layer:

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings:

9 / 0.95 / 244

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: -5 / +6 / +2
Midtones: +16 / +11 / +16
Shadows: -11 / +1 / -9

Step 4

Create a new layer underneath your boot layer called ‘shadow under boot’.

Use a medium sized, soft black paintbrush (around 20% opacity) to build up a shadow between your boot and the ground:

Create a new layer ABOVE your boot layers and call this ‘shadow bottom of boot’.

Apply a further shadow underneath your bottom area, but this time overlap the bottom of your boot slightly, blending the boot into the shadowed area:

Step 5

Open up the ‘door’ image from the resources section for this tutorial. Select the door using your preferred selection method and then paste it into your original document.

Go to edit>transform>distort and distort your door so that it fits better with the edge of your boot:

Apply a levels, hue/saturation and color balance adjustment layer to your boot layer:

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings:

23 / 0.93 / 241

Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer Settings:

0 / -20 / 0

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: -56 / -29 / -11
Midtones: -30 / -9 / +12
Shadows: -32 / -6 / +5

Step 6

Right now our door is looking a little flat and not really part of our boot’s structure.

To fix this, create a new document called ‘shadow over door’.

Use a soft, black paintbrush to paint around the edges of your door, creating the effect than the door is concave into the structure of your boot:

Download the ‘bell photo’ image from the resources section for this tutorial.

Cut it out from it’s background and paste it into your original document.

Position and resize the bell to fit next to your doorway. The colors are already pretty well blended with your surrounding composition, so no adjustments needed just yet:

Step 7

Open up your ‘roof’ image from the resources section for this tutorial.

Extract the roof part of the image from it’s background and paste this into your original document.

The roof is roughly at the right angle, so just use your basic transform tools to manipulate it very slightly to fit the top of your boot better:

Apply a levels and color balance adjustment layer to your roof layer:

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings:

22 / 0.81 / 247

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +12 / +2 / -2
Midtones: -25 / +6 / -1
Shadows: +12 / -6 / -8

Step 8

Create a new layer called ‘shadow over roof area’. Use a soft black paintbrush to shadow the bottom part of your roof and the top part of your boot. This should help blend them better together.

Step 9

Open up the ‘wooden beams’ image from the resources section for this tutorial.

Select one of the beams using your preferred selection method and copy/paste it back into your original document.

The colors of the beam are pretty well blended already with the rest of our composition, so no adjustments are needed for now.

Duplicate the beam several times. Resize and transform each beam to fit as a support for your roof structure:

Add a further beam to sit horizontally underneath your roof.

Then create a new layer called ‘shadows blending beams’. Use a soft black paintbrush to add shadows to the top of your beams, blending them better with your roof area.

Finally, apply a layer mask to each of your beam layers. Use a soft black paintbrush to mask off the bottom of each beam, blending it into the leather of your boot:

Step 10

Create a new layer beneath your beams called ‘beam shadows’.

Use your lasso tool and paintbucket tool to create some rough black shadows where you anticipate the shadows cast by your beams to go:

Reduce this layer’s opacity to around 55%, and then go to filters>convert for smart filters. This will allow you to apply filters not destructively. Now go to filters>blur>gaussian blur.

Apply a 3.5 pixels strength gaussian blur:

Step 11

Open up the big ben clock image from the resources section for this tutorial.

Extract the clock part of the tower, and the square frame surrounding it. Paste this into your original document:

You’ll notice that the clock isn’t the right angle to fit with our rooftop right now. This is a pretty easy fix. Simply go to edit>transform>distort and distort your clock until it looks like the image below:

Apply a color balance adjustment layer to your clock layer:

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +11 / +4 / -11
Midtones: +25 / +6 / -16
Shadows: +6 / 0 / -18

I also created a new layer called ‘shadow clock’ and used a soft, low opacity black paintbrush to add some additional shadow around my clock:

Step 12

Time to add a chimney to our roof!

Start by opening the ‘chimney’ image in the resources section for this tutorial.

Extract the chimney and paste it back into your original document.

Position the chimney over your roof, and use a layer mask to mask the bottom of the chimney smoothly into your roof area (using a soft black paintbrush for this):

Apply a levels and color balance adjustment layer to your chimney layer:

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings:

20 / 0.79 / 240

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +16 / +11 / -9
Midtones: -13 / -6 / -9
Shadows: +4 / 0 / -8

Step 13

Download the ‘FanExtra premium brush set: Clouds’ brush set from the resources section for this tutorial.

Create a new layer called ‘smoke’.

Select one of your cloud brushes and use a white paintbrush to give the impression of smoke rising up from the chimney of the house:

To make the effect slightly more subtle apply a layer mask and use a low opacity, soft black paintbrush to mask off areas of your smoke:

Step 14

Now paste in your ‘window’ image from the resources for this tutorial.

Apply a layer mask and use a soft black paintbrush to mask off the area around your window, blending it more smoothly into your boot’s surface:

Apply a color balance adjustment layer to help blend the colors of the window better:

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +2 / -4 / -2
Midtones: +29 / +12 / -4
Shadows: +21 / +9 / -15

Step 15

Add some additional lighting and shadowing to your window.

Use a soft, low opacity black paintbrush to paint in shadows around the left edge of your window.

Then use a soft, low opacity yellow/orange brush to give a subtle tint of light coming out of the window:

Step 16

Cut out and paste in your doormat image from the resources section for this tutorial.

You will need to go to edit>transform>distort to distort the mat to fit nicely in front of your door:

Apply a levels, hue/saturation and color balance adjustment layer (in that order).

Levels Adjustment Layer Settings

23 / 0.89 / 224

Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer Settings:

Hue: 0
Saturation: -55
Lightness: -25

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +1 / +4 / -9
Midtones: -2 / -4 / -11
Shadows: -5 / +1 / -6

Step 17

To help blend your doormat better, create a new layer called ‘shadow doormat’.

Use a soft black paintbrush to paint in shadows between the doormat and the door, as well as underneath and to the sides of the mat a little.

Download the free grass brush set from the resources section for this tutorial.

Create a new layer called ‘grass’. Use your eyedropper tool to sample a shade of green from the surrounding grassy area. Use several of your grass brushes to create areas of grass that overlap your welcome mat.

Step 18

Copy/paste in the image of the girl sitting from the resources section for this tutorial. Position her so she is sitting on the end of the boot:

Adjust the colors of the girl very very slightly just to fit better with the surrounding composition.

Then create a new layer called ‘shadow under girl sitting’.

Use a soft, mid-opacity black paintbrush to brush a shadow under the girl and slightly covering her right side. This makes it look more realistic that she is actually sitting on top of the boot:

Step 19

Paste in the ‘running children’ image from the resources section for this tutorial:

Apply a color balance adjustment layer. You should aim to make the grass in your ‘running children’ image match the lightest grass in your main composition.

Color Balance Adjustment Layer Settings:

Highlights: +8 / +35 / -16
Midtones: +13 / +40 / -23
Shadows: +9 / +13 / -26

You’ll notice that whilst your color balance adjustment layer has turned your grass a nice color, it’s also made your children green. To fix this, simply mask off this area of your adjustment layer, just like you would a normal mask. Simply select the mask attached to your adjustment layer and use a black paintbrush to paint over your children, thus returning them to their original, non-adjusted color:

Now select your ‘running children’ layer and mask off the edges of the image until you’re left with just your children and a little blending grass surrounding them:

Step 20

Copy the ‘red balloon’ image from the resources section for this tutorial into your original document.

Option+click on this balloon layer to select your balloon shape. With your selection active create a new layer called ‘balloon shadow’. Use a soft, low opacity black paintbrush to paint a shadow on the left/bottom side of your balloon, making it more rounded:

Create a new layer called ‘string’.

Select your paintbrush tool, and select a 1px, white paintbrush at 55% opacity. Use your path tool to create a wavy path dangling down from your balloon. In your paths palette right click on your path and click ‘stroke path’, selecting ‘paintbrush’ as the stroking option.

This should stroke your path line with a 55% opacity 1px white line. This is an easy way to create a simple balloon string:

Step 21

Time to start adding some final lighting and adjustments to our piece.

Create a new layer called ‘blue lighting’. You want to give the impression of some of the blue of our sky bleeding across into the boot/grassy areas. This should give the impression of various light sources in the piece effecting one another.

Use a large, soft paintbrush tool (69cbe1) to create a series of soft blue spots along the edges of your boot and grass:

Reduce this layer’s opacity to 10% to make the effect more subtle:

Repeat the same steps on a new layer called ‘green lighting’. This time paint green (456300) light spots along the bottom of your shoe, as if the green from your grass is casting this color upwards:

To make the effect more subtle change this layer’s blend mode to ‘overlay’ and reduce it’s opacity to 20%:

Step 22

If you check out the image below you’ll see that our sign post is a strange color. This is caused by the original adjustments on our ‘grassy field’ layer.

To fix this we could always mask off that area of our original color balance adjustment layer. However, we want even more control over our sign color than that!

Create a new hue/saturation adjustment layer (DO NOT APPLY A CLIPPING MASK TO THIS ADJUSTMENT LAYER).

Apply the settings shown below:

Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer Settings:

Hue: 0
Saturation: -55
Lightness: +10

This will cause your sign to become a nicer color, but will also reduce the saturation of the rest of your image, which you don’t want!

To fix this, select the mask associated with this adjustment layer. Fill your entire canvas with black (thus masking off your entire adjustment layer). Then go in with a white paintbrush and paint over your sign area.

This will reveal your hue/saturation adjustments, but only in this specific area, as your reveal your adjustment layer’s mask.

And there you have it, safe, non-destructive blending, with plenty of control!

Step 23

To give a slightly more fantasy look to our piece we’re going to apply a dodge/burn layer.

Create a new layer called ‘dodge/burn’. Change this layer’s blend mode to ‘overlay’.

Then use a soft, low opacity black paintbrush to burn your image, and a soft, low opacity white paintbrush to dodge it. You should aim to create a more unified light source, accentuate shadows/highlights where appropriate and just generally bring the feel of your piece together more:

Step 24

As a final adjustment apply a gradient overlay adjustment layer (DO NOT APPLY A CLIPPING MASK TO THIS ADJUSTMENT LAYER).

Select the default gradient overlay ‘orange, yellow, orange’.

Reduce this layer’s opacity to 2%.

And We’re Done!

You can view the final outcome below. I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and would love to hear your feedback on the techniques and outcome.

Download Source File for this Tutorial