Final: Magazine Cover

My magazine cover once again features Meena, who this time graciously agreed to pose for the various pictures. My magazine is the July 2010 edition of "Meena Monthly," a fictional publication designed to discuss Meena's life. For this magazine, I tried the "pictures married to type approach." As you can see, it's butterfly-themed. If I made this an actual magazine, I'd probably have butterflies marking the featured articles inside. The two stories I've summarized with an author are a) a fashion section, which highlights Meena's clothing styles, and b) an interview with Meena. The other articles are written vertically along the right edge of the magazine. (The article titles themselves also reference Meena: "Sushi for Dummies," "From Sweatpants to T-shirt," and "Types of Pretty Boys.") The text is composed of two fonts: Vivaldi and Jellyka (the more stylized one). I'd say that the toughest part of this entire magazine was the main graphic. I don't have a very steady tripod and, although we tried to shoot quickly, the light was changing. As a result, I had to do some very serious editing to cover up the lighting inconsistencies.

Pop Dots and Clipping Mask with Text

"Gaussian Blur and Median" was a pretty tough tutorial for me to grasp, so I instead opted to do the Pop Dots tutorial, and then the Clipping Mask one. For this tutorial, I used a picture of an orchid that I photographed in Costa Rica. I'm quite proud of how this picture turned out, so I kept it as a reserve for a really cool tutorial. As you can see, I didn't do the image precisely the way that the tutorial indicated; I played around quite a bit with gradients, and I used the clipping mask on everything but the cutout, giving this kind of cool, gradiented look to the text as well.

Depth of Field with Layer Mask

The Depth of Field Layer Mask tutorial was waaay too long. It was pretty simple, and could have been explained in half a minute instead of 5. For this picture, I took this picture I shot of a bird in Costa Rica. After duplicating the layer, I added a layer mask, then used a circular gradient to focus in on the bird and blur the branches around it.

Masks, Knockouts, and Luminance Bleeding

I used the DVD's photos for the third time since I began lessons, primarily because there was so much already done for me, and I didn't feel like painstakingly tracing out a layer mask for my own photos. The tutorial went as expected, and the picture looks more or less like the picture in the textbook.

Color Range Masking

Once again, a picture of my dear friend Meena, this time shamelessly taken from her Facebook profile (if she has any serious problems with this, I'll take this down and redo the graphic. But I don't think she will). I composited it with a picture of my cousins' backyard in Pittsburgh - with snow! I used the "Refining Selection with a Quick Mask" tutorial, since I liked working with that better. This experiment with masking certainly went better than my previous one, although there's still a little too much border around the image for me to be completely happy with it. Furthermore, "Color Match didn't really work extremely well with these two pictures, since the background was less contrasted than the added picture. To play with this, I converted the image to Grayscale, then to RGB, and gave both layers an individual Gradient Map, which allowed me to play with the shadows and highlights until they were a bit more evenly matched. I was basically happy with it at that point, but I felt like giving it a name.

Plugin

I have once again used my dear friend Nandi for this image, and the picture was once again taken by Tom Head. For this, I used a plugin titled "Spooky Picture," which essentially desaturated the photo and increased shadows. After that portion was finished, I whitened the teeth a bit, dodged the eyes to make them shinier, and changed the eye color to green, since, for whatever reason, Nandi's eyes showed as a startling shade of magenta when the plugin was finished working its magic.

Surrealism

The base of this image is once again a photograph my my friend Tom. As such, I think I'll just link to his deviantArt here: http://326159487z.deviantart.com

What I did for this image was first to toy around a lot with the base. It looks really unnaturally lit at this point, which is sort of what I was going for. I also used a red layer set to "color" with a layer mask that just covered the eye. Then, I duplicated the color layer and set it to "color dodge." The odd circuit-heart symbol is my vector art. I actually have a much sharper version on my computer, since this is a symbol I use pretty much everywhere. However, this image is my attempt to replicate the image using a pen vector. It turned out okay, although it's messier than the image it's based off if. Finally, the futuristic-looking things coming out of his eyeball are actually a picture of a chandelier in my cousins' house in Pittsburgh. I basically slid right underneath it and snapped a picture. In order to further the illusion, I duplicated the layer, locked the transparent pixels, then colored the image black to give a silhouette. Then, I moved it below its source, used free transform to stretch it, blurred it, and finally set the layer to "overlay" to give the impression of a shadow.