Gray Scale Sketch; Final

For this assignment I had to make a rough sketch for the final to put my main concept and ideals in the Photoshop document as it is. It was hard getting detail in the fore ground without killing sight of the whole image, but I ended up doing more detail for the back as needed. I used a lot of brushes in order to go over all the necessary things that had to be done with the image (the river, grass and clouds had to be more lifelike and less robotic so I messed around with the scatter and the dynamics of the brush). The overall assignment was mainly a lesson to be learned for future assignment in order to get all of the necessary requirements, and sketching out an idea is one of them.

Epic Vista

For this assignment we were supposed to create a matte painting with the images we were given by our instructor. We were supposed to use a minimal amount of three images, but I ended up using all of them. For this composition, the main fore ground was the hardest to color correct because it either ended up too green or too red when I had come close to the main corrections. I had to make the images aligned in this way so they would sync together much better. The selection process was also kind of long, but ended up being a big key into creating this whole piece. Over all I would have to make the foreground less red, but I believe it is a well made composition.

Experiment Matte Painting

For this assignment I had to use 6 different pictures, and then sketch them out by painting over the main one in order to make outlines for all of them. It was really difficult getting a good feel for all of the pictures in order for them to blend well and in sync. This blending had to be one of the most challenging I had to face, but with my experience it made the background and foreground communicate with each other efficiently. I had a lot of inspiration with scenarios we saw the last class we had in certain matte paintings. It was really fun to apply many of the techniques I learned in school; including the one we learned last class.

Matte Painting

The assignment was much easier masking out the sky background and the background for the man in the cliff. Using any other tool other than the brush tool will take anyone quite a long time to finish. Color correcting the images together was quite difficult since they all had completely different color saturation and lighting. I ended up choosing a light filled theme for the entire piece since I believe it is much more vivid and good to look at. I used the eraser tool for the ‘man off cliff’ in order to get the right alignment for the layer masks, then used the stamping tool.

                I definitely liked how the layers worked with each other. The man on the cliff mixed well with the background after I was finished with the piece. The sky mixed well within the same cliff image. I decided to get rid of the blue cliffs all the way in the back since it messed up the color corrections too much and just added the bottom half of the sky image instead.

Final Inking

For this assignment we were assigned to ink our self-portrait and our redrawn image that we have done on that same week (illustrator). It was essential for me to use thin and thick lines in order to create a good illusion in the drawings. I had to make the thin/thick lines based on distance and the coloring/shading based on light. My self-portrait looks like a Picasso sort of piece which makes the look more unique, but it can have more lines in order to get the shading in there properly. It is a fairly straight forward assignment, but it was difficult working with the pen tool in order to fill in spaces with colors/shades. I had to ground the pen work in order for the fill bucket to work, but doing so didn’t allow me to shade in the pen strokes themselves. That being said I should of just copied the whole layer in order to keep an original one and then make edits to the other one in order to ink the strokes.

Self Portrait

For this assignment I was assigned to redraw a picture taken of me. This self-portrait was layered out in adobe Illustrator using the brush blob tool. I had to work more with geometrical shapes to make the portrait much simpler. I had to outline the hair in a weird way in order to make the portrait more fluent and easier to color in when I shade in color. Using the pen tool is actually pretty difficult for me. If it wasn’t for the practice on illustrator/Photoshop I had before, this would of taken me hrs., except it took me just one. I did manage to make the outlines of the major shapes and dents though, and I have to say I really did capture my face in this one.

Redraw Image

For this assignment, we were given the task to ink a picture of a drawing we made in either illustrator of Photoshop. I used Illustrator for this drawing since it is a lot easier to manipulate all sorts of drawing utensils, while Photoshop is more about photo-manipulation. I had to use the pen tool for the contour of the whole picture. Making the lines for the main drawing was important, but I had to change the coordinates of the anchors and I had to change the thickness of the strokes in order to make it look nicer.

            It was hard trying to make the thin and thick lines at the same time. Connecting the lines with the pen tool was hard as well. That being said, all I did was change/connect the strokes uniform when I messed up. The hot keys “O” and “P” was really useful when I had to work in consistency with the drawing.

Color Blending #2

            In this assignment we were given objects to fill in and color-blend them in their interior. It is essential to copy the borders of the object and select the interior of the objects in order to color in and shade without having any messy mistakes. I used the hard brush in order to fill in the objects first. Then I used the soft brush with lower opacity in order to blend it in the end. The other assignment was to redraw a drawing made from hand. All I used was the brush tool in order to redraw the drawing. Later on I can color in the drawing, as well as add blending to it as I please. The assignment wasn’t that hard to begin with, but it was time consuming. I have good experience with the type tool, but I should of just copied the borders instead of the whole thing to save more time.

Color Blending

Photoshop to me just turn into an entire piece of canvas with a lot of different utensils at my disposal. The only reason I used the brush tool was for filling in cut outs I did with the lasso/wand tool, along with the eyedropper tool. Creating a whole piece out of scratch seems extremely difficult, especially if you don’t know how to blend colors. In this assignment I started by using the eyedropper tool to adjust the colors I wanted and stamp the colors with the brush tool right next to the shapes (to make the work more efficient). The same process was used for the extra credit (apple). After that I just made my custom brushes out of pictures I have.

              I started coloring with the shapes with a blurred out brush tip, going with a 50 sized brush. The sphere was difficult to work with since the colors weren’t in a straight orderly fashion, so I had to arch away the painting strokes. To make the visible strokes disappear I used the same blurred out brush tool and lowered the opacity and flow (using the eyedropper to get the color in the middle).

Color Correction #2

For this assignment we had to color correct an image that we have taken over the past weekend. In this image my girlfriend’s mom is posing in front of a pair of vases and a nice painting with light shining on her from the outside. The image originally was too bright and had color problems (little saturation and it looked burned). I had to make the picture look normal by adding enough saturation in the highlights but not in the shadow parts. The most difficult part for this assignment was making the subject colorful with-out making her look too fake.

            I used levels, curves, and hue/saturation in order to control the balance of colors in the picture. The brightness/contrast of the image was then solving by using the so named adjustment. In the end I just finished it off with the color balance and the vibrance in order to make the picture very vivid.

Alpha and Quick Masks

In this assignment I had to use the quick mask method in order to crop out the subject. It wasn’t that hard for me since I’ve been doing this for a while, but there is always a sensibility issue that I have when it comes to specific details. The way I used the brush tool was with the shift key in order to keep straight lines and I changed the pattern of the tool in order to be smoother. I also used the smudge tool in order to get some of the hair for the girl’s heads so it would look more natural. After all of that, I selected the wand tool in order to refine the edge. Then I saved them as alfa (including the inverse) and then saved the files as targas. 

Text Poster

I’ve decided to posturize the well-known phrase “Cartman” uses from the show called “South Park.” It was really fun making the poster in general with all the cropping involved when I had to edit the mask layers. The assignment started with the main text, which I used 3 different blending modes to get the desired effect, then the layers styles (like drop shadow and inner glow). It was hard to get the right amount of the satin effect since it kept over powering the color of the text, but I managed to get the right amount of it in the end. After that I just added adjustment layers to the whole thing and then cropped out part of them in order to give the text more debt with the different layers of colors. In the end, I just added a Japanese volcano on top of the both backgrounds and blended it using the ‘blend if’ option to take out more of the shadow parts from the volcano and leave the highlighted lightning.

            The assignment wasn’t hard, but it did occupy a lot of time in order to make. The layers were organized from my file and could use more work for the solid color backgrounds. Overall it was pretty fun and interesting in creating a poster based on a silly quote.

Color Correction

I understand that color correction is a method that people use in Photoshop to make the image easier to crop out the subject or the background. It is also used to differentiate multiple subjects within the image, and makes them stand out more. The assignment was extremely difficult to cope with, specially the images like the bird and the rooster (one had too much shadow and the other had so many different colors). I fixed the rooster by using the black/white adjuster and then fixing the hues from there (using green, a little blue, and red saturation). Then I selected the bird and made it lighter that the background. I tried using curves for the bird, but I didn’t come across a significant change in the image other than an inverse/negative color layout.

The money was also done the same way, but I didn’t select anything and I had to focus more on the shadows of the image. I tinted the shadows of the image yellow to make them easier to manipulate (since the shadows didn’t have a common color to begin with). The Quirigua monument was very hard to handle since the image had a monochromatic style to it already. If I change one aspect (saturation, hue, brightness), the entire image changed dramatically. To work around that, I used the curves, color balance, shadow/highlights, and hue/saturation (in this order). I ended up finishing, but had a little trouble with the hue/saturation because the image was really sensitive at that point.

Cropping Assignment

             I'm not going to lie; the assignment looked a little intimidating. The pictures were both difficult to deal with when I had to crop out the backgrounds. The fact that hair was flying all over the place made the images extra hard to work with the lasso tool. I did stick to the lasso tool when the color of the hair and the background was similar. If it had sections were there was mostly white background and dark hair contrast, it was much more effective if I used the magic wand tool to cut out that background. The magnetic lasso was very helpful when the situation called for it. It was particularly useful in the image with a very colorful background (the little girl). The lasso tool has its useful moments, but make the work go very slow and at the same time made me frustrated at points.

              It was really fun figuring out the different ways in which I can do this job. I'm sure there's a lot more methods to crop out backgrounds that we didn't go over in class, but it was still a fine finish for the assignment.

Haiku

Photoshop is really complicated software, but somehow it's also really fun to use. Making sure the photo looks realistic is really hard, especially if you have to fuse other pictures in it for a whole piece. Some layers look to pixilated and others look too real/sharp/focused. It takes such a long time to crop out images if you don't use the magic wand option. The tone from my assignment is good since I took the lighting of the sky into consideration. It was an assignment that tested my ability to apply my skills into a poem. I will have to find new ways to sharpen my skills even further.

Content-Aware

In this assignment I had to make these three kids disappear in the picture. Grass should have been an easy landscape to work with in order to make the subjects disappear, but I was wrong. I had to go over a lot of different spot healing options. I had to check off proximity match as a last touch up, and content-aware if I have space in the top of my selection. It was really difficult to get the fence brushed up so I had to use the clone stamp tool.

I did have a lot to work with in this assignment. There were many problems that made me push myself in order to get the grass looking less funky. It was no ‘walk in the park,’ but I did the assignment as best as I can.

Collision: Matte painting Earth

            Now that I have gone through this assignment, I know that you can accomplish into doing almost anything in Photoshop. Not only that, but you can also accomplish those goals in numerous numbers of ways. In this assignment I had to make the moon crash into the planet. The first thing I had to go through was the background for the moon and the foreground colors. I used black/white, purple, and red to make the fore ground for the moon. The background consisted of yellow and white, where I had to smudge and blend with overlays with the foreground. Then I had to add three different types of lightings and glows in order to get motions in the picture.

            The hardest part of this process was adding texture to the actual collision without making it seem like it’s painted on there. I had to add noise and a blur filter. The lighting all consisted of a radial blur and certain brush strokes. I had to add a lot of color for the collision in order to blend the moon and the earth together.