Final Cover

I enjoyed this class very much. What a fantastic program Photoshop is and I still can't believe how much more there is to learn about it.

Here is my Final Cover; for a magazine I created and titled "the printed picture"

Panoramic Photo Merge

This is a picture taken at Lake Almaden. I used a combination of 9 images to create this panoramic image. Even though this technique is very simple to use, I had never know about it and have always wanted to create images such as this when my wide angle lens was not quite wide enough to capture the entire width of a scene.

Dots here, Dots there, Dots Everywhere

This is my creation using the pop dots technique.

Depth of Field and Knockouts and Luminance Blending

These are the two pictures I created for this assignment. This first one above was working with depth of field using photoshops filters.

and this second image was created with two images using the knockouts and luminance blending features of photoshop.

Midterm Collage

I choose to create my collage on the most devastating man-made environmental disaster that occurred at sea; the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. The terrible tragedy happened on March 24, 1989 and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the sea. As the story goes, the ship was allowed to veer off its course to avoid icebergs in the outbound lane. The Coast Guard had given permission to use the inbound lane, but failed to keep watch as it sailed out and inevitably hit the Bligh Reef. There were allegations made against the ship’s master that he had been drunk during the time of the accident, but later in trial he was cleared of this charge. Later he had even admitted to drinking vodka that evening. Not only had he admitted that he had been drinking the two men he left in charge of the wheel were not given the time off that is mandatory before working a 12 hours shift.

I think this is important for a couple of important reasons. First, you have to wonder, if the ships master had not been drinking or had the two men who took over the shift had their required time off before starting this voyage would the accident been avoided altogether? If the coast guard kept watch till it passed all possible obstacles would the spill been avoided? Second, it’s astonishing how much damage took place during the spill, especially wildlife. Hundreds of Thousands of animals died immediately; including seabirds, ear otters, river otters, harbor seals, bald eagles, orcas, billions of salmon and herring eggs. Amazingly enough, after a year of cleaning and in area’s most visited by people little visual evidence of the event remained, but even today the effects of dying wildlife still exist.

The message of my collage I hope will be a powerful emotional feeling of sadness when first viewed. While accidents do happen and they will continue to happen it would be great to have the message bring awareness to people as they look at it. I hope it will inspire an awareness of the importance of safety, the importance of consciousness and being diligent in carrying out extreme professions and awareness in the environment and how vulnerable it is. I want people to understand devastating events such as this one continue to be destructive for so many years after; and how the innocent sea life suffers on. In addition to the emotional feeling I wish to produce, I’d also like to bring a bit of shock to people when they view the collage. I’d like to show a better understanding to how much money was spent in the aftermath of cleaning this up.

TYPOGRAPHY GRAPHIC

For this assignment we were to select a typeface that woud set the tone and theme for the graphic of our choise. This is a picture of my nieces and nephew and under neath them is a poem done in a nice font I thought we perfect for the picture.

Playing with Selection Tools to Extract

While I was becoming frustrating trying to learn the masking from scratch technique, I decided to practice more with the quick selection tool and refining edges option. I ended up with this composite.

Here is the original image I extracted Kiki from.

Lesson 5 - Extracting with Masks

This weeks lesson was to define a mask from scratch...or it's also called manual masking. We also learned about Color Range and another Extract tool, which to me seemed much easier with a more complex image and both of these techniques are more automatic techniques. I tried several images that did not have a simple background or such extreme contrast to begin with and was not able to pull a mask out. If anyone knows of any other tutorials on this I would appreciate a link so I can practice more. Thanks


I ended up using a more simple image and ended up with this final image. One other tip I ended up finding on the Internet was that while I created a nice mask off this eagle, there seems to be some whitish and darker edges around the tail and top of his wings. I read that you can select "Layer" then down at the bottom select "matting" then you have three choices, I used a combination of the two "Remove Black and White Matte" it worked great.

Lesson 4 - Complimentary Color Scheme

The wine cave and the glass of wine, which is reflecting the tasting room bell tower, was taken at Wente Vineyards in Livermore. The reflection in the glass is not a separate image. I choose to use a nice complimentary color scheme for this image. I really liked with way the blues looked with the warm yellows and oranges and thought it gave the cave a very interesting mood. I wanted to stay with the yellowish hue as it was the closest color to chardonnay I saw, which was the type of wine in the glass. This image has nine sources all together, not including the duplicate image of the grapes. At first look you might not notice, but if you look closely you will see six other images. For some unknown reason I was compelled to include very faint ghostly like images of some friends faces that I just recently took at a birthday party.


The only difference I noticed about using the colorizing method verses the duotone method is that the duotone comes out cleaner without having to do other adjustments. When I applied my colorization and even when I played with the gradient technique I ended up having to go into the levels to bring out a more distinct contract. The image came out perfect when I applied the duotone adjustment first try. What I am really starting to think about Photoshop is that they overloaded it with too many ways to basically get the same final result. It’s just a matter of trial and error and experimenting to learn which ones work fastest or best for what your final outcome will be.

Continued Lesson 2 - Duotone

This is a picture of my dog Sparky, he was cut out of it's original picture by using the Quick Selection tool as well....and moved into this other beach photo. This was the first image I started working on for this lesson, but decided after I created it that the contrast was just not sharp enough and it was lacking some details. The image below was much more satisfying and the details and contrast is what I was expecting.

Photoshop CS3 - Lession 2 - Duotone

The duotone image. This is two images, one of my husband and one of Lake Almaden. I loved the contrast that came out of using the duotone technique and how sharp the reflection turned out in his sunglasses.

The selection technique I used for extracting my husbands face was the quick selection tool. I also used the refine edge to get a nice clean cut around the mustache .