Lab: Painting Effects

Using a photo of a sunset that I took myself, and I gave the sky a painted effect by using the mix brush. The trees and ground are also painted, but on a separate layer, so they would remain distinct. The contrast of sky in the painted photo has been increased, and given texture by using an emboss filter as shown in the video. Of the assignments thus far, this is my favorite. 

Painted Picture:

Original Photo:

The effect of this technique is nice, but it takes a very long time, and it was hard to tell which parts had been painted as they were the same color as the background. I had to turn off the visibility of the bottom layer every few strokes to see what I was doing. That may have been a problem because the sky did not have much distinct detail in the first place.

Combined Photos: Ballerina

For this assignment I chose to use a found picture of a little ballerina from the internet, and combine it with another picture of a little girl's head. It was difficult to match the two together because the head photo is shot under a tree, and has a greenish tint. Too merge the two together I adjusted the color and brightness of each one's skin and hair so they would match. Also, I flipped the face I was using horizontally, so it would fit better. I used the clone tool to help cover up the seams between the parts of the picture, the smudge tool, and the eraser set on a low opacity to help blend the two together.

These were also used to adjust the dress, so the neckline is higher in the finished picture.

Artistic Effects

The original picture of the horse above was put through the photocopy filter, then had the excess details made by the filter removed resulting in almost an outline. After that I used the thick and thin line patterns provided in the files for the chapter to make a crosshatch pattern in the shadows to put detail back. This is the result:

First Assignment: Straightening a Photo

This first picture is the result of using only the straighten button in photoshop. As the book said it automatically cut the picture, because it no longer fit in a perfect rectangle. The photo directly below is a screenshot of the original automatic crop that photoshop did.

 

I stepped backward once to see what was cut off, and re-cropped the picture slightly differently. In this version there is less of the hill showing, and the boulder in the ocean is not cut off strangely. However, this cut left small portions of the topmost corners blank which I filled in with the remaining sky. Then, I resized the picture to 600 Pixel Width to 399 pixel height and 72 DPI. The earlier crop that I had done made it just a little bit off from the proportions, and entering the correct pixel height caused the width to go over 600, so I trimmed off a bit more of the sides so it would fit the correct dimensions. Then I saved it as a JPG, changing the quality to 9 because I was going to be posting it on a website. The picture below is the finished product.