Project 5

Breaking News!!!
Just in, all across the world, giant rocks have just started to emerge from freshwater lakes. These rocks vary in size, shape, and age, but they all have one thing in common... they float in the air. This recent event is believed to be the cause of a new chemical compound formulated to breakdown certain minerals for scientific study. Once this chemical is used up, it is deposited into nearby rivers. This is because it is supposedly safe for marine life, in unsalted water, or once diluted, safe in all natural bodies of water. This compound, though, has a surprising effect. When the chemical breaks down minerals, it brings to life a previously unknown organism that burrows into rocks and emits helium. these tiny critters live in nearly all freshwater rivers and lakes. They find rocks of relatively soft composition and make a home in them. These single celled organisms have been deemed harmless to all living creatures. The rocks they make float, on the other-hand, are not safe and pose a moderate threat to anyone on, under, or near them. Both the scientists responsible for the activation and for the discovery of these organisms are quickly trying to figure out how to stop the potentially dangerous floating boulders from seriously hurting or killing people. For now, governments across the globe have issued statements telling people to avoid these rocks as much as possible.

I got the idea for this project after seeing the title of a photoshop tutorial. It was basically explaining how to make a picture like the one I made, but I figured out how to make this picture on my own. I started by taking some photos of a mostly open area, in this case the Columbia River. Once I established a few good base photographs, I was almost ready to start work on the rock, but I felt something was missing. I decided to combine two images of the same place at different exposers into an HDRI. This allowed for greater depth and a more vivid color range. After I had the background how I wanted it, I started looking for a good picture of a rock. I browsed through some online caches until I found 2 that might work. I started with the first one (called "...option1" in the pictures below) by first color matching it, then resizing and repositioning it. The image wasn't to my liking so I got rid of that rock and focused on "option2." I again, ColorMatched it, resized it, then repositioned it. At this point, it was way too bright and it was lit from the wrong angle. To correct this, I adjusted the Brightness and Contrast, then Exposure, then Contrast again. Now it wasn't too bright, but there was still the issue of the wrong angle of light. To correct the lighting, I Burned the light parts to make a more uniform shadowy appearance and touched up the rest of the rock this way until I thought it looked right. Because the rock layer I removed from it's original image included the sky of the original image, I Highlight Dodged the sky areas to correct the Burning I just did. Finally I added another layer and Burned a shadow of the rock into the water.

Project4

This project called on some pretty meticulous selecting, but I managed to achieve the desired element without too much trouble. I think the most difficult aspect of the project was the fine work that had to be done with the many details of the strings and net. I started by photographing a toy boat I own with my macro lens. Because this left much around the target, I cropped the image, then began by selecting major areas I wanted to remove. I used the magic wand to do this. This didn't get all the desired areas selected, so I entered "QuickMask" (it's actually very slow) mode to manually paint away what I didn't want. This step took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to complete. When I was done, I still had some residual background left around certain parts of the boat (i.e. the strings). to get rid of this, I "RefineEdge"ed the selection and contracted it to take out the bad spots. Then I shrunk the pretty large, 5340 x 4464 image down to half its size and prepared a new image. I made the new image 3 times larger than the halved boat image. then I copied the boat image into the middle of the new image, and kept copying from there. Each time I made a new copy, I would drag it to places it would snap (the edges of the new image and of each other). Then I just added various filters to each copy which were their own layers. I ended by adding a gradient filter, at full opacity, to the previously all white background. I only used photoshop CS4 and its plug-in CameraRaw for this project... well, those and my camera of course.

project 3

For this project I chose to work around a fairly simple image with little to no clutter. I did this to make sure I wouldn't get caught up in tiny details and to be able to work much faster. I started with an image I took using my new 58mm macro lens. I photographed a blue die against a blue pad. I took the image as a monotone and added a reddish filter to it to allow for grater editing later. After I had the base image I wanted, I opened it in Camera Raw and added a targeted adjustment using the adjustment brush to add a blue tint to the die. I used a combination of "SmartMask" and regular masking techniques. once I had what wanted, I opened the RAW file in the main photoshop interface. I proceeded to add a second layer and used this as my drawing layer. Then I stared outlining the die's edges and circles. Once I had this done, I chose the color of the circles and began drawing those in. I did the same with the rest of the die. Then I chose a lighter area of the pad, but didn't begin painting it yet. I first selected the pad area using the "MagicWand" tool. I refined the edge so I wouldn't have to manually clean up the edge. I now increased the size of my brush significantly and filled in the pad area. Since the image was severely lacking dimension at this point, I went ahead and made a new layer for the shadows. I then chose really dark versions of the colors used and started to paint them in using a low opacity. I made the gradation very clear and choppy to maximize ease as well as add a cartoony effect to the picture. I was now finished and I think the image turned out pretty well. I'm not big on drawings (as you can tell with my work), but I'm satisfied.

Project 2

I designed this image with the idea of sharp, cutting, jagged edges in mind. I felt symmetry would help achieve this feeling as well as make the entire image feel more full. As you can see, I didn't use so many basic, standard shapes, but combinations of circles and polygons to bring a natural, yet surreal sense to the work. I initially used the program Alchemy to draw a colorless shape scheme. I loaded this into CS4 and began by anding a gradient map layer to add life and motion to the background. Then I selected the foreground, subtracted the inside leaving only the edges, and filled the inside of this with a gradient map. Then I refined the outline and placed the original shape (centre and all) beneath the foreground as a separate layer. After that I resized the layer, made it less opaque and placed it as a shadow. Finally, I went to the foreground layer (outline) and added an outer-glow along with a textured emboss.

I mainly used black and white, but I brought some life to the image with the green outer-glow. I think this makes the image dark and frightening with a touch of madness. The reason I chose black and white (aside from the glow) is that it brings attention to the shapes of things and not their color. It also darkens the overall feel.

Project 1

For this project I decided to to take multiple photographs of a tree in my lawn, then photomerge them in CS4. Then I proceeded to cut away excess image and narrow in on the tree. Then I adjusted brightness/contrast and exposer. After that I converted the image to black and white and further adjusted color, contrast, and brightness. When I was mostly satisfied, I added a photo filter and a post-crop vignette to darken the sky a little and draw attention to the tree. I think that the focus of the photograph was always mainly the tree, but after cropping and adding the post-crop vignette, I think the image now solely focuses on the tree.