Next week

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Surreal-Photo-Manipulation/67407

Week 2 Project 2

I looked through my different vacation pictures since I am normally a portrait photographer so it never came to me that someday I might need scenic photographs. I found this ocean landscape from when I went to Corpus this past winter. It is kind of boring and plain by itself so I figure it would be perfect to add different elements to make it a piece of art. I decided to put a vignette around the corners to keep the attention to the center and cleaned up the beach of unwanted items dirtying it up. Next, I found from my collection of where I took a picture of the sun so I thought it would be a cool element to put in the sky. I just copied and pasted it into the sky and picked lighten as the blending mode to use since it didn’t mess with the sky. I wanted something on the beach so I looked up footprints in the sand on google and picked the one that I liked. It took me a few different tries to figure out how to make the sands blend in where it looks natural. I finally found out that if I put it on darken for the blending mode it made it pretty close look like it was natural but then to make it perfect you have to play with the levels. Next, I went to the picture that I made earlier in the week and dragged the little girl in that picture to this picture. I wanted here to seem like she was fading so I chose darker color for the blending mode and took the opacity down to 65.

I then layered in several different textures and clouds as well as playing with the different blending modes to get the final picture.

FINAL IMAGE!

Try 2

I did what you asked and got ride of the rolling clouds and I could not figure out how not to make the house transparent with the blending modes so I just layered the house on top of itself 3 time with different blending modes. I also put a rust texture on the top of it. Do you like it better than the first one?

Week 2 Project 1

 

The picture above was my inspiration piece that I decided to replicate. First I had to google a few images to use to create the eerie scene. I started off with just a simple background of trees with a misty look that I thought would be a good starting place.

Next, I looked through the pictures of houses that I had in my collection and tried a few. My first couple of tries did not work well and the pictures just did not seem to fit. I finally found a house that seems to look natural and put the blending mode to multiply. I also put a vignette and burned down the picture to make it seem darker. I also looked through my photographs with children and picked one that had movement to it. I had to scale down the child though because she was bigger than the house when I copied and pasted it in. I also used the multiply blending mode and adjusted the level of the picture of the small child.

I wanted the picture to have more of a misty effect so I googled clouds and chose a few different types of clouds that I thought I would like to incorporate with my final image.

These are the three cloud pictures that I picked out to use. The first cloud picture that I used was the third picture. I opened it in photoshop flipped the image and adjusted the levels so that most of the blues would become black in order to make the blending easier. After I adjust the levels I copied and pasted it into the image I had been working on and put the blending mode to screen with the opacity set to 11. I did not like how the clouds were falling so I scaled the cloud image and moved it around till I found what I was looking for. Next, I used the cloud image that is in the middle and copied and pasted it straight into the picture without changing anything with the original image. I put the blending mode to multiply with this image and took down the opacity to 75. I then went back to the last cloud image and copied and pasted it again into the picture but this time with the blending mode to multiply to give a luminosity look to the right corner of the sky.  Lastly, I took the very first cloud image adjusted the levels and used the screen mode again. Finally, the image has been completed!

Next Weeks Projects

I think for this next week project I would like to do either of these websites

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/design-a-beautiful-cosmic-space-scene-in-photoshop

or

http://www.behance.net/gallery/CD-design-concepts/1368135
(specfically the boy and the house)

Assignment 2 week 1 Walk Through

This is my original photograph that I decided to use for the second project this week. I chose a high key background because it makes it easier to select my model so that I can put a textured background. I learned from last time if you have multiple layers to start off it does not work so I merged all my existing layers from retouching so there was just one layer to start with. Then I looked up textures in google images and chose one that I thought looked cool and grabbed my attention. I opened the texture in photoshop and selected the whole picture and pasted it into the picture that I had been working on. I had to scale the concrete image so that it would be close to the same size as my original picture. I then made the concrete layer the very first layer so that it comes before the picture with the colored design on it. I turned off all the shapes and the concrete so I can see just my model. I double clicked her picture so that it says layer 0 instead of background. Then I duplicated layer 0 so I can select my model with the magic wand. Once I have selected the picture I went to select then invert. Then under edit I selected fill and filled what was once my model with white since the background is black. The image is now a black background with a white silhouette. While still on that layer you need to select all and copy it then turn off the layer so it does not appear. Next, you should click on the copy of the layer 0 and drag it down to the mask button at the bottom of the layers panel. You should get a white box that appears right next to the actual image of copy layer 0. If you hold down the alt key while clicking the white mask box that you just created then it will appear and then you can paste what you copied to create your mask. Make sure that the mask is selected when going to edit, adjustments and then to invert. The new textured background will appear around the model. I then adjusted layers, brightness, contrast, exposure to both the image now as a whole and the background itself. I wanted to see what it would look like if I took the background and layered it over the picture again. I really liked the look and this way I was able to adjust the opacity over my model and still having it strong in the background! After that I made a new layer at the top and filled it with 50% grey. Then I went to the filter gallery and played around with putting more textures on top of the texture I had just added. I picked Texturizer and made it the feel of canvas and put the lighting to the Right since that were my lighting for the original photograph was directed. I then decided to look up a shattered glass affect to layer into my background. To add it I just did the same exact thing with all the other textured looks from google images and put a bit of a Gaussian blue to the layer. I also added a water ripple at the bottom right of my picture.

First Assignment Walk Through

This was my inspiration piece for the first assignment

How constructed my final image: First I chose one of my images off of my hard drive and made sure that it had been retouched and then converted in black and white in Photoshop. Below was the image I choose off my hard drive before I put the circles and the textures on the photograph.

From there I chose the shapes tool which is located towards the bottom on the left hand side. If you right click the icon you can choose different shapes that you can work with. Most of what I used was the custom shapes tool which allows you to choose from a wide variety of different shapes. Make sure you have shapes layers and create a new shape layer clicked at the top of your settings. I found that after you created a shape if you did not click new shape layer again that the next shape was on the same layer. To make the shapes symmetrical you have to hold down shift when you drag the image out. I made all my shapes white first and then clicked each layer and changed the color. After I choose all my shapes colors if you go to your layers on the right hand side you can play with the blending modes to made the shapes blend in with the pictures. I used both the screen and multiply blending modes and changed some of the opacity levels to make the picture flow better.  Below is what my picture looked like with the layer of shapes. After I was done I put all the shape layers into a group so it would not be so messy.

I then wanted to see if I liked my image better with the textures Professor Babcock showed me. I chose a concrete texture off of the internet to use as my background. I opened the concrete in photoshop and selected the whole picture and pasted it into the picture that I had been working on. I had to scale the concrete image so that it would be close to the same size as my original picture. I then made the concrete layer the very first layer so that it comes before the picture with the colored design on it. I turned off all the shapes and the concrete so I can see just my model. I double clicked her picture so that it says layer 0 instead of background. Then I duplicated layer 0 so I can select my model with the magic wand. Once I have selected the picture I went to select then invert. Then under edit I selected fill and filled what was once my model with white since the background is black. The image is now a black background with a white silhouette. While still on that layer you need to select all and copy it then turn off the layer so it does not appear. Next, you should click on the copy of the layer 0 and drag it down to the mask button at the bottom of the layers panel. You should get a white box that appears right next to the actual image of copy layer 0. If you hold down the alt key while clicking the white mask box that you just created then it will appear and then you can paste what you copied to create your mask. This is where for me it got tricky and I am not totally sure how I got the concrete to show up in background. You are supposed to be able to hold down the alt key while clicking the new mask that you just made to see the concrete but instead I kept getting the white silhouette. I think though after I had deleted my other layers of the background is when I finally got the new background to show up. Since I had deleted all my previous background layers I had to do an adjustment to make my model black and white again. I played around with the adjustments and adjusted the levels, contrast and brightness of both the image as a whole and just the background by selecting the different layers. Lastly I made a new layer and filled it with 50% grey then I went under the filter gallery and selected film grain. I bumped up the grain and made sure it was applied to the whole photograph. I did not want my model to be so grainy so on that layer that I had just made I put a slight Gaussian blur on that layer.

More Research for Digital Studio

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Finally-Free/850865

http://www.behance.net/gallery/CD-design-concepts/1368135

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Selfreflect/52768

http://www.behance.net/gallery/OM/347733

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/design-a-beautiful-cosmic-space-scene-in-photoshop

Research Links

 http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Surreal-Photo-Manipulation/67407

 http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/create-an-abstract-design-with-patterns-in-photoshop

http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/create-a-vibrant-abstract-vector-design-illustrator

http://www.jkost.net/