Liquid Flowers

This tutorial was called "Liquid Flower Effects." The whole point of this tutorial was to transform milk droplets to make them look like the are part of the flowers. First I just used the magic wand tool to get rid of the background of the droplets and the refine edge tool to get rid of any excess and smooth the edges. Then a layer mask was painted over the make the liquid blend into the flower. Next I added a gradient overlay to each droplet to make it blend into the flower that it was on. Most of this tutorial was just transforming the shape of the droplets and making them blend into the flowers. It was pretty simple but it took a really long time to get everything positioned just right. I don't think my droplets blended as well as it looks in the tutorial image, but practice makes perfect.

Retro Pin-Up

This tutorial is called "Get the Vintage Look." The point of this tutorial was to turn a modern photo into a vintage pin-up photo. Again we used Camera Raw to warm up the undertones of the original photo and conceal some of the smaller blemishes on the skin. Then I used the patch tool to get rid of blemishes and under eye bags, the spot healing brush tool to cover freckles and a high pass filter to smooth everything out. A surface blur was used to create a painted effect. I learned how to convert layers into a smart object and this merges all of the layers into a new layer, but still preserves the previous layers in case you need to go back. The next couple steps involved changing her eye color and adding some blush to her face and smoothing her skin out some more. Then a radial gradient was used to create a warm yellow-y background. Next, a textured background was added and then I changed the blend mode to multiply so it could blend in with the yellow background. The tutorial used the liquefy tool to make her waist smaller, but the tool did not seem to work at all no matter how many times I reread the directions and re-did the steps, so I ended up skipping this step.

My Pin-Up

Betty Blue Movie Poster

This is another tutorial from Practical Photoshop magazine. The point of this tutorial was to recreate a Betty Blue style movie poster. I really liked this tutorial and it was one of the only ones that turned out just like how it looks in the magazine. First Camera Raw (which I have never used before this) was used to manipulate the original images to get a more high quality result. Next, several different gradients were used on the background layer to get the desired effect. I have used gradients before but I didn't know what the different kinds meant. There is foreground to transparent and foreground to background and I did not know what the difference was until this tutorial. I used the polygonal lasso tool to cut the face and arms out from the background and then used adjustment layers to hide the remaining parts of the background and to blend the model into the sky and make her features stand out against the dark sky.

My image:

Image from the tutorial:

Halloween Pumpkin

Tutorial can be found here.

I really did not like this tutorial, but I decided to post it anyway. I think a different version of Photoshop was used (the tutorial was made in 2008) because I would follow directions exactly and things just would not turn out right even after going over the directions multiple times. The first part of the tutorial was adjusting the shape and color of the pumpkin. Then, the tutorial said to use a brush tool to sketch the mouth and eyes. Next, it said the create a new layer and use the magic wand to select the inside areas of the mouth and eyes, which didn't work, so I had to do it on the previous layer which then made other things not work in the following steps. I do like the background of the image. A clouds filter was applied and then sections were duplicated and made different colors and then blending together, and an elliptical selection was used to create the reflection on the table.

Fantasy Landscape

For this project, the idea was to put together several different images to make a fantasy landscape. I don't think that mine looks very realistic but it was still really fun to make. The first part of the tutorial was to create faces in the tree, which didn't turn out so well. I ended up only using one of the faces because the process was just too time consuming. There was a lot of morphing and blending the faces into the trees and rearranging the leaves. Next, the mountains background was put in and the Marquee selection tool was used to cut pieces of the grass from another image. Then two different flower images were added. These were hard to blend (using layer masks) together and make this part of the project look realistic. The tutorial added fog to blend the layers but I don't think it worked very well. 

Create a Jungle

I chose the project from the Photoshop book where you had to create an urban jungle in London. This project took forever and there was a lot of steps but I think it turned out really nice.

This tutorial introduced a new technique to add images to the project. The Calculations Dialog box was used to change the colors and blending modes of the different channels to create a new Alpha channel. Then the contrast of the channel was increased and then painted over with a black or white brush. Then a layer mask was applied and the image was dragged into the project and transformed accordingly. This technique worked really well if the painting over with black or white brush but sometimes it took a while to get it exactly right. I ended up just moving the entire image into the project and using a layer mask to erase the extra parts and blend it in. I think this technique would be really useful with some more practice. I think my image looks similar to the one in the tutorial. They included more foliage and more shading to bring everything together and make it look more realistic.

Original Image from the tutorial:

Typography Effects 3

This week, I decided to play around with some of the text tutorials found here. They were pretty simple to I did a couple of them at once. Most of the tutorial involved creating different effects with the layer styles. There's a lot of tutorials that I really want to try but they involve using the pen tool and I just can't do it.

Quick Gold Text

 Hypercolor

Plastic

Double Type

Project 5: Wheels on Fire, Round 2

I attempted to finish the Wheels on Fire tutorial. I used the same finished car from the last post and added some more smoke and fire. I used the city background image from the tutorial and I just used a layer mask and erased the background instead of using the pen tool. On another layer, I made stripes of paint to make the sky and then used a Gaussian blur to make the colors blend together. I ended up using the completed car image from the tutorial to get the lines on the road. I cannot get the hang of the pen tool for the life of me, so I again used a layer mask and erased the rest of the image. Then I added a bit more smoke to make everything blend together more. I duplicated the car layer to make the orange-y tones even brighter. The last thing I did was use the brush tool to make some little sparks in the flames. No matter what I did in this tutorial, my car just did not turn out as"glowy" as the car in the tutorial, and that was kind of disappointing. 

Tutorial Image: