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.