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.

Mid Term: Historical Montage

For the midterm, I decided to do my historical montage on the moon landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. More specifically, I decided to focus on the now-immortalized quote by Neil Armstrong. This image consist if several layers, but just 5 images. The base for the entire picture is that of the astronaut standing on the moon, which I scanned from the December 1969 edition of National Geographic. The figure in the foreground is, obviously, Neil Armstrong, whose image I got from the marvelous Wikimedia Commons. The Earth in the background was not in the original image, and I added that in after a quick Google search. The actual source of the image is from Western Washington University's website. The record behind the quote is a picture I took of an actual record we had in the house, called "Sounds of the Space Age." Finally, the quote itself was typed by me, uttered by Neil Armstrong, and the Halo font is entirely thanks to 1001 Fonts.

Healing and Patching

This is the second time that I have used the DVD's photo to complete a tutorial, which, quite frankly, I don't like doing, since it limits the amount that I actually learn from the tutorial. However, I possess no significantly marred photos to complete this tutorial, and therefore opted for the DVD's. I think I went a little too crazy with the Healing brush, since the decrepit man from the original picture now has no wrinkles, save those on his forehead. However, I like how it turned out overall.

Retouching a Face

My friend Nandi looks absolutely lovely, as usual. However, the original lighting in this photo was somewhat less than ideal. Most of her face was in a bit too much shadow, and there was an annoying glare coming from the upper left corner of the picture. The Burn and Dodge tools helped considerably ease the unevenness of the picture.

Typography

This was fun to make, and took a fairly short time. I have once again used a picture of my friend Meena, who is here looking contemplatively up at a tree. My text says, "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia," a quote from author John Green's book, Looking for Alaska, which eh unabashedly stole from his wife, Sarah Urist Green. I used two fonts for this, Halo and Chopin, to give a contrast between the looking-forward aspect of the first half of the quote and the half-musing tone to the second half. In order to create the color effect, I duplicated the background, then cut all but Meena out of the top layer. From there, I used the Gradient Map on the bottom layer to make it go kind of retro and blue, then used a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 1.0 to bring Meena into a contrasted focus. Over all, I really, really like how this one came out.

Type

This tutorial wasn't so much hard as it was multi-stepped. It took me perhaps a little over an hour to do this. However, although this basically looks like the textbook's finished product, I can't help but feel as though I did something wrong. Since I can't figure out what that is right now, I'll get back to it.

Masking

My friend Meena is a mental giant, and now apparently a literal one, too. This assignment was to experiment with masking techniques. I think I can now confidently say that I am terrible at masking. It took me a couple of hours to even get the mask right, and even then the selection wasn't perfect. I had to clean this up a great deal even after I had transferred Meena's picture to the background. I suppose the one thing I am proud of in this photo is that I managed to make her look as though she's behind the doors.

Match Color

For the background of this image, I used a picture that my friend Tom took (used with permission) of Interlaken, Switzerland, while I blew bubbles. The second picture is a picture that I took of myself for an album art project that I did for English. I tried to position my fingers so it looked as though I was cupping a giant bubble in my hand, with moderate success. The bubbles, as you may have noticed, have a different color than the background from whence they came. I did this by duplicating the background, then deleting everything that wasn’t bubble so I could colorize it separately. Selecting the bubbles was probably the biggest pain while I made this, because bubbles are see-through and can’t really be selected via Quick Select or Magic Wand. I chose the Tropical Waters gradient to make the background a cool blue theme so that the fiery bubbles would look a bit bolder. Overall, this was pretty fun, especially since I got to play around with my own gradient to colorize myself and the bubbles.

Colorizing Grayscale

The main difference between the duotone and the gradient map is that the gradient map allows for a substantially greater variety of colors. The other interesting thing is that it’s not strictly a light-shade-of-gray-to-light-color scheme. The original picture was actually a very serene picture in front of a waterfall. I originally played around with the preset gradients and the twelve from the DVD, but none of them really gave me the effect I was looking for. I ended up making my own gradient using warm colors and black and white as anchors at either end. I really liked how it took a picture with a very tranquil atmosphere and turned it into a raging, white-hot waterfall.

Duotone

The merging of the photos themselves was surprisingly easy. I took my friend's picture in a darkened church in Vienna, and the background is the view from a hotel room in Anaheim, CA. I think the toughest part was cropping my friend out of her her original picture, since her arms tended to disappear into the background. Converting to duotone was pretty simple; I just fooled around with the colors for a while until I came up with a result I liked. After that, I played with the curves so I could get the right "pop" for the picture.