Week 3 Project 1

To do this image I followed instructions from this site http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Surreal-Photo-Manipulation/67407

I will touch on some of the problems that I found the tutorial did not touch on very clearly. First off, if you do not have CS5 then you cannot do puppet warp. Under edit transform the regular warp does just as well I think though. The most problems I had was cutting off the head and using the elliptical tool and filling it with a gradient to make it look kind of natural. I found out that to remove the head is just doing a simple mask to erase it. Then in order to fill the elliptical tool the circle you make must be already on the skin itself and not on the background otherwise filling it will not work. You can move the gradient circle around to find where you like it afterwards. Another thing that I found difficult and just took some playing around to figure it out was using the perspective tool to make the shadow.

help!

I figured out the warp but I still am not able to figure out filling the head part. I used a mask and erased it then I tried using the elipitcal marque tool and filling it with a gradient and it just is not working for me. I do not know what I am doing wrong.

Cassie

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)