Final Project

I always wanted to be on the cover of a Magazine. I guess this is still not a reality for me, but this is close enough for the time being.

Enjoy! Thanks to This class I a able to create works on photoshop with a lot more ease and confidence than I was able to before.

Depth of Field layer mask

This was actually a lot easier than any of the mask techniques. At least for me :)
ASU opening football game 2006. I wanted the face in the foreground to be the most in focus. I used differing shades of grey on the body up to the guy with his mouth open in the background. The rest is black once I created the Alpha Channel. Came out pretty good. I am definitely going to use this technique more often. I also tweaked the blues to make them more vibrant and adjusted the levels to make the blacks and mid tones a bit darker.

Text as a Clipping Mask

This one was pretty fun. I was actually looking forward to learning how to do this even before I was enrolled in the class. I like this technique. I had to put a drop shadow and an inner glow in order for the word to stand out from the back ground. The dark areas were taking away from my word. I wrote "Smoking kills" as my word because two family members passed away due to smoking. I added the bubble wrap filter because I thought it gave the picture a cool look.

Enjoy!

Layered Composition

I used a picture of myself driving at an autocross last summer. I had to use a mask to cut out the car because my blur was taking over the car, not what I wanted. I then put the car as my top layer, the blurred layer next and my background layer was unchanged other than tweeting the color/levels. On the blurred layer, I unsaturated the colors a little bit to give more of an out of the field of view look. I wanted the attention on the car and the yellow boxter in the background was too bright. Here is my attempt at it. Oh, I also adjusted the levels of the car to take away some of the glare that was caused from the cloud cover.

Masks PT 2

This was so much easier than when I attempted this earlier in the summer.

Obviously this is not my own pictures. I used the tutorial to create this one.

Plug-ins

I found a cool plug in to increase the effect of the HDR photo. I wanted it to look almost fake, and photoshops version just was not enough for me. I used Photomatix's plug in for HDR photos. It was recommended to me by one of my good friends. I took 3 photos, one at regular exposure, one at one stop down, and one is one stop up. I put them together using the photoshop HDR pro and then after I fine tuned the picture on there, I used the Photomatix plug in and came out with the intense look I was going for.

Pen Tool

This one was pretty simple. Create a piece of art using the pen tool and some other images. Create surreal artwork.

Just for fun....

My girlfriend posted this picture of us up on facebook with the caption, "limited edition". So, I decided to make this little add.

Mid-Term Project

This is a collage depicting the Japanese Internment during WWII. I split the picture into 2 sections, one being the American side and the other is the Japanese side. I added the atomic bomb pic in the background because it shows the true hate Americans had towards the Japanese at the time. The lower right corner is a solider watching over the camp, (Artist: Roger Shimomura). I then cut out pieces of his other artwork and put them into the shape of the soldier with the gun. The background is a blend of light red, almost matching the american flag and a off yellow that I matched to one of the news clippings background. The picture in the lower left of the Japanese flag has been converted into a duotone, I used black and the off red color as my colors. I added some Japanese words to show the difference in the views of Japanese and Americans at the time. 

Enjoy. None of the artwork is mine, the photos are also not mine. This is solely for the purpose of the class.

Colorizing Greyscale Image...

I forgot to post this one up.

I used the picture off the CD and one of my pictures from last football season. 

Masks

Masking was hard for me. I still haven't perfected the technique. It will take me some tinkering with photoshop to really figure it out. (I didn't have a good image with little background detail :/ that was the real issue)
This image didn't take too long. I used the Quick Mask tool to help after I failed and failed at the other techniques.
After I put the mask on, I pulled the picture over to the background image which I lens blurred but gave it a gradual blur to show the focus moving toward the picture of me.

Colorizing an Image

This was pretty easy and fun to do. I chose to use two pictures I took for a photography project in High School. The person in the picture is me and the pictures were both taken the same night in Downtown San Jose. I also used a graffiti "The Truth" just because I wanted to add something to that wall.

I fist cut myself out of the bus stop photo and placed that image onto the hallway image. Next I converted both images to gray scale. The hardest part was cutting out the graffiti in this picture.
I decided to use 2 colors, blue for my seated picture to convey some sort of sadness, and an off orange for the hallway to convey a little more warmth. I also lens blurred the background to give some depth.

Duotone Assignment

I first took an image of the Bull and road in Sedona, AZ ... I then used the polygon lasso tool to cut out the white long horn and adjusted the size, quality, colors, and the contrast and brightness in both images.

I then put both into gray scale. I then cut out the bull, flipped him so the shadow on his body matched the direction of the sun in the road pic, re-sized him to look better, and refined the edges to blend a little better. I had trouble figuring out how to make his hooves blend to the ground so it didn't look like he was just floating, I will get better at this as time goes on. I then click duo-tone and picked an orange. Fixed the contrast and came out with the finalized product.