Final Project - Magazine Cover

For this project I used National Geographic as a design inspiration. I used Color Match to adjust the colors in the portrait to make him look like he belongs in the background. I also blurred the background image somewhat to make them blend better.

Note: I've corrected the dimensions in this version and reposted it. The dimensions were supposed to be 8.5 by 11 and started out that way but didn't end up that way.

Halftone Dots Background Effect

I thought the group in this photo had a very Mod Squad stance, so I chose a sixty's color combination in a turquoise and black dot background.

Collage Re-Visited

I wasn't happy with the composition of the collage I turned in for my midterm and re-worked it a bit. I think this is a little more balanced and shows the Victorian ladies better. I added a few more elements, like the "Truthiness and Consequences" church marquis (a reference to T.V. comedian Stephen Colbert and to the old T.V. game show) and the historic photo sequence.

See November posting for original version.

Blending with a Special Effect

I used a photo of my son on the playground (a long time ago, he’s now 16) and duplicated the photo and applied the Poster Edges effect. I then created a layer mask and used the gradient tool to create the effect of blending from reality to a poster drawing. It's subtle, you have to click on the photo to see the enlarged version to really see it.

Surrealistic July 4th

I started with a photo taken on July 4th of two people reflected in a glass patio table sitting on a deck. I composited in part of another photo of an outdoor art installation (Helco) from our photo collection, an image of a bowl of fruit that I created in Illustrator (following an online tutorial), and some images of fish that I traced using the pen tool and then converted into custom shapes. I used the pen tool for all cut outs/composites.

Using a Quick Mask - Homework 11

I started with the blue channel on the photo of the Man to begin creating a Quick Mask. It took a good bit of touch up with the brush and select-and-delete to get the mask cleaned up, but the results were quite good. I didn't feel it needed any adjustment once the Man was composited on the photo of the palm tree.

Layering Experiment


I took two projects - healing a photo and one using vector objects - and experiented with blending them together. I had to use the gradient tool on both layers and do some tests to keep his face from blending out too much.

One Image in Two Contexts

I did this composite of sleeping kittens on lotus leaves for one of my class projects on using a mask. I eventually want to do some expermenting with shadows to tie these more closely together.









Next I used the same selection of two kittens to try out (more or less) a tutorial I saw in Layers Magazine in which the author shows how to create a logo from a photo image. The author used Illustrator and I used Photoshop. I think the results are interesting but not necessarily the best for a logo - it doesn't look as though it would reproduce too well.

Midterm Collage Project


For my collage topic, I’ve chosen the invention of the motion picture as an important historical event which has had a profound impact on perceived cultural knowledge. To do this topic justice, I would have needed a much larger space to incorporate the many, many relevant images that I found. I decided for the purposes of this project to focus on a couple of key events in which we have seen the most interaction between motion picture (in these cases, T.V.) characters and real public figures. I thought it especially ironic that in these case, the public figures are politicians. The day that I did the final work on this project, the Mercury News published an article in which it quoted a study that said 1/3 of Americans believe in ghosts. I think it can be difficult at times to discount the visual memories we have of "seeing" ghosts so many times in a motion picture.

To create the collage, I composited images from seven digital sources. I scanned and used the article from the Mercury News. The other news sources were from the Internet; I printed these and sat on them a few times to give them a slightly aged look, then scanned them to use in the collage. The background image is of the back of a yellowed and aged Kodak print. I used some free, downloadable brush sets for the images of handwriting and the Victorian ladies.

Using Text Creatively - Homework 7


For this assignment, I used the photo of the Harbin Ice Festival snow sculpture that I had given up on previously due to too low a resolution of the original photo. It occurred to me after I watched your video that using a filter to create more of an illustration effect might work very well with this photo. Thanks to Jean for this idea! Harbin, by the way, turns out to be in China. The Harbin Ice Festival is something I would like to see for myself some day.

Using a Color Scheme - Homework 4

For this project, I started with a photograph in our collection of a young teenager modeling a flower headdress at the Renaissance Faire. I liked the vibrant color combination of mostly red and blue and decided to create a triadic color scheme by adding some yellow. I used two other photographs for the final image, both of which I purchased from iStockphoto. I found an image of a single daisy that was a very saturated yellow and wasn’t sure what I’d do with it but after playing around decided I liked it enhancing the headdress in a kind of sun ray sort of way. I turned down the color saturation on it a bit (if you can believe it). I was still thinking of sun rays when I found the second image for the background, which is a photograph of some aged decorative paper. I liked the rather dirty look it had and the way the soft orangey tones add a bit of harmony to the scheme. I think a triadic scheme of primary colors would have looked too harsh without some sort of softening effect.

Colorizing a Black and White Photo - Homework 4


I used the black-and-white photograph supplied for this lesson in the text. My overall feeling after using the Gradient Map tool (and Hue and Saturation) to colorize a black-and-white photograph rather than the Duotone feature is that the tool I would choose would probably depend on whether I had a specific effect in mind when I started. For example, if I knew I wanted to create a sepia effect, it would probably be easier to use the Duotone feature because I already know I will want to mix yellow and black. After the research I did for this last week, I also know of some other specific color combinations that are commonly used in Duotone images (blue and black, etc.).

On the other hand, if I am simply experimenting with an image, the Gradient Map technique is nice. I think it’s interesting, though, that as enthusiastic as the author is about this approach, he still felt he needed to supply some custom gradient selections to make it more useful. I could see why when I used the default selections applied to the photo of the girl in the hood! The Reverse feature is really nice in the Gradient Map and is the reason that I like this version the best. The Reverse feature gave an illuminating glow inside her hood. As far as I know, there isn’t an easy way to do this using Duotone.

Duotone - Homework 3


I worked extensively with another photograph that I really liked that was e-mailed to me of an enormous ice sculpture in Harbin (Finland, I think). I finally gave up on it because at a resolution of 72, it was just too pixilated. I tried a variety of things to smooth it out, but nothing really worked well. Rats.

Anyway, I went back to this photo of a boy reading with a dinosaur t-shirt. I purchased an image from iStockphoto and used that for the T-rex image (this came as a jpg). This was fun to do. I found that it really helped a lot to consider how well the images will mix tonally. In the ice sculpture pic, I wanted to add a new young plant growing out of the ice and found that the first two plant pictures just wouldn't mix (I did find one that worked pretty well, but still, sadly, had the pixilated ice sculpture pic that I couldn't fix).