Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Image Manipulation

Original Photo

Photo with the background pole and pipe on the ground edited out. This was very simple and fast, when done with the content aware fill.

Original picture

Picture after the red spots are photo-shopped out using the spot healing brush. Once again simple, just took a tiny bit of patience and eye for color.

Original image

Image after edited with the cloning stamp. Using this stamp was fun! Simple and effective, hardest part is dealing with shadows. I'm sure it'll become much easier with practice.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Inner Me

Source picture #1
Walking in the hallway

Source picture #2
Background

Source Picture #3
Link, the hero from the Legend of Zelda video games

Everything  all compiled together and photo shopped. This project was not as easy as the others we've been doing. My first difficulty was getting the selection of me on the background to look right, such as finding a good background picture and getting a very fine selection of my against the school wall. Next difficulty was the shadow's legs. They still didn't turn out perfect, but look much better than they first were. Excited about starting photo manipulation next though!

Friday, February 17, 2012

iPod Silhouette With BRUSHES!

My creation. My child. The project I've been working on for over a week. And I must admit I really like how it turned out! It was very difficult at first and I never would have created something that looked respectable with the pre-loaded Photoshop brushes. So the first day or so was downloading and searching for many different brushes on Brusheezy. At the end of the project I have 70 MB of Photoshop brush files on my flash drive. Next was adding the brushes to the right place while using the right color. I did the outer ones first, making them all basic fire colors because I wasn't sure how I wanted the more centralized brushes to look. After going through brush after brush I found the theme I wanted and went with it! All in all, fun project, really love using these cool brushes!

Monday, February 13, 2012

Brushes Free Form

This is my first time messing with brushes in Photoshop. The assignment was kind of difficult since there was no guidance or things to look for other than "create a cool, abstract image" but it was fun to be able to create something from scratch. Most of this was created with scatter brushes, except the solid swirl.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

iPod Silhouette

Source picture, me jumping in the hallway!
My iPod silhouette created in Photoshop. Turning my picture into a silhouette was simple with the hardest part being selecting the right stuff, but I had a hard time getting the iPod along with headphones to look realistic. The pen tool was frustrated and took many times to get the right flow of wire, and then adding the brush to it was weird at first because it was the first time working with brushes. Ear buds were made with the paintbrush, just putting a dot at the end of the wire. And then putting fingers over the iPod. I spent a full day trying to get fingers to go over that iPod and look good. Eventually I got it, and it looks realistic enough. Next assignment: making abstract art with brushes, I'm ready!

Monday, February 6, 2012

Combining Silhouettes With Simple Illustrations

Source Image

In this tutorial I took the original image and first masked out the rock part from the background. Then I smoothed out the edges (after a few tries, it was tricky finding which layer and settings to smooth) and filled it all with this dark brown color. I created a gradient in the background and made a low-opacity  layer of the flower symbols in the sky while masking it to keep it only on the background. I used the same masking effects to put the sun symbols only on the rock, and made it low opacity as well.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Quick Collage Using Vectors

Source picture #1

Source picture #2

This is my rendition created by following a tutorial on combining collages and vector images. I liked using vector images again, it reminded me of the good old days with Illustrator... The hardest part was knowing which layer to select to create the many masks and different effects. I'm glad we got a harder tutorial to work on, because harder assignments typically look much better in the outcome than easy ones. 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Motorcycle and Odometer Collage

Source picture #1

Source picture #2 (The Odometer)

The hardest part to this tutorial was finding the right odometer! Surprisingly there aren't many pictures out there of speeding odometers. Ones without watermarks that is.  I ended up using a picture from the tutorial, using the crop tool to take out the parts that weren't needed. A new skill was used by adding a gradient to the layer mask, which wasn't very new except trying to get the gradient in the right position to hide those pesky picture boundaries!