Project 4: Wheels on Fire

This tutorial is called 'Wheels on Fire' and is from the Photoshop magazine. This tutorial was super frustrating and took forever and would not turn out like the one in the tutorial no matter I did and no matter how many times I reread the directions. Although I do like the way it turned out, I might come back to this tutorial later. First, I used a quick selection tool to remove the car from its original picture. This was so much easier than using the pen tool. The tutorial said to use a layer mask and paint over the decals and lettering on the car and this just did not work at all. It looked okay at first, but the next couple steps involving duplicating the layer and blurring it, and then it just highlighted the parts that were painted over and made them even more noticable, so I ended up leaving them. You can't really see them with all the smoke and fire anyways. The rest of the tutorial was added smoke and fire layers and transforming and blending them into the car. For my smoke layers, every time I added a new layer, it somehow erased the previous smoke layer and I had no idea how this happened and I kept having to start over.

Project 3: Typography Effects

Today I tried a tutorial for a 'Harry Potter' text effect. Tutorial can be found here. Overall, the tutorial was pretty simple but it took a while to finish. The text layer was duplicated three times, and each time the layer was duplicated, the tutorial said to 'clear the layer style' which I didn't know you could do. The rest of the tutorial was just changing the blending options of each layer to create different effects. Going through the settings for drop shadow, inner glow, bevel and emboss, satin, color overlay, gradient overly, etc is what took the most time. The settings were also different for each layer to give the text a 3D effect. My text appears to be grainy and I couldn't figure out why, so I probably missed a step somewhere. I then merged all of my layers into one because it was easier. Then I applied a Gradient map, which changes the color of the entire thing, and you can make thing any color or type of gradient that you want. The tutorial added some sparkle brushes but I don't like the way mine turned out. I haven't made any kind of 3D text before, so it was nice to learn how.

Project 2: Nature Photo Manipulation

Tutorial used can be found here.

The tutorial I used is called Create a Nature Inspired Photo Manipulation in Photoshop, found on psd.tutsplus.com. I opted for a simpler tutorial since I am still getting back into Photoshop and I feel a little rusty. I was also able to use some tools that I have never used before.

This tutorial used a lot of different blending modes. There were two different tree layers, one set to multiply and the other set to color dodge to give the tree a different effect. For the sky layer, a screen mode was used to make it blend into the background more. For the text, soft light was used, which kind of makes the text blend into the background. Usually when I use text, I prefer it to be very bold, but I like the soft light mode for things like this. This tutorial involved grouping layers, which I have not done before. The hand, tree, and sky were all part of one group, and the lighting was part of another group. The owls were selected from their original background using a quick mask, which I have never heard of. You basically make a mask over whatever object you want to cut out of a background. I had a little trouble painting in the owl since it has so many feathers sticking out, but with some retouching I think it turned out okay. Overall, I think the composition turned out good and I really liked this tutorial. It was a good refresher and I learned some new things along the way.

Project 1: Reawaken the Dead

This is my first project so far. The tutorial was called "Reawaken the dead" and halloween is coming up so obviously I had to pick this for my first project. There was a lot of work with layer masks, which I haven't used too much before. There were several different layers (like the skull layer, the teeth layer and various texture layers) that needed a layer mask to get rid of the excess. Instead of using the eraser tool, the tutorial used layer masks and you paint over the excess and it acts like an eraser. In the tutorial, they used the stock photo of a man's face and the skull stock photo they used seemed to fit perfectly with his face, but it didn't match that well with mine so I used the free transform tool to get things to fit my own face better. I've done some zombie faces before using Photoshop, but this tutorial had a really good idea for making bloodshot eyes. The used a cracked paint texture and a layer mask and then adjusted the hue/saturation to make them red, but there is a little box called 'colorize' and when you click that and then change the hue/saturation, the results are so much better. The teeth part was kind of tricky and mine didn't blend as well as I would have liked. I would like to go back and play around it to get it to blend into my face better.