My next class is a Photoshop class. The only project to be posted on the board this week is "anything", that's right, just photoshop something and share it with the group. So I sat down yesterday and had way more fun than I usually do. Usually if I started just playing with Photoshop guilt would get to me and I'd have to go do laundry or do something with the kids. But wait, this IS what I'm supposed to be doing!The palette made me crazy. This isn't exactly what I wanted to do; I wanted to blend the other colored images (all from the Adobe Samples folder of safe, non-offensive images-- after all, I'm sure the teacher didn't really mean anything...) with the original paint blobs to make it look like glossy blobs of these images, but I'm not good enough with Photoshop yet to make it happen, so I settled for this.
The boat and lake image is the one provided for an example in the assignment, so I couldn't resist doing something else with that.
A collage for spring!
Book Cover Using Layer Masks
Assignment: combine images into a cover for a book or CD. I picked Way of An Eagle by Ethel Dell, which I had just read, and been very impressed with. Things were so different back then! It's fun to read a story written when things we consider unusual now, like having servants, were common, and things we take for granted, like a car ride, were worth featuring in the story.
About the novel:
The Way of an Eagle was published in 1912 and by 1915 it had gone through thirty printings. The Way of an Eagle is very characteristic of Ethel M. Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout. A modern day critic, Nicola Beauman, says: "Most modern readers will greatly enjoy The Way of an Eagle, for it remains the best kind of read for anyone wishing to curl up in an armchair...and wallow unashamedly in a book that is entirely timeless...I love to imagine my mother and grandmother sobbing over books like this."
It's an old-fashioned love story with some wonderful messages. If you'd like to wallow too, you can read Way of an Eagle free here, at Gutenberg.
The lady is Gladys Cooper, an actress in the 1910s. I bet she'd make a great Muriel.
Using Clone Brush to Remove an Object
I'm especially pleased with the slide picture. I used the pen tool to make a new shape of shadow to match the railing, and airbrushed some of the surface.
This one was an assignment. Non-optional. Take this guy's beautiful skin and ruin it with a tattoo. Okay: let's at least make it a good one!
Assignment: Create a print ad with layers, selections, and masks.
Example of what we were supposed to produce.
I picked pianos for my project because "it's easy to sell a product if it's something you really like".
I used the pen tool for all the outlines. Pen tool makes
superior outlines! It's a huge improvement over the way I was doing
things before.
Please note there's no reflection of legs in the original, but I added them. I had to do each leg separately.
And another product, with another great reflection :-)
There are the elements, here's my finished result:
