Ok-Chap 9 has been redeemed

So now I understand the mask lesson-still not sure why I was not able to access the mask to uncover the mountains the first four times and the redeeming factor was learning how to merge all the photos and then being able to paint in his misses into the last photo-can't wait until I can use that- I have ideas brewing....so over all this was frustrating but rewarding in the end-still think he needs to have someone go through his lessons to make sure his instructions work....

Frustrating Chapter 9-Building Layered Compositions

So this is this worst chapter of the book....so far...if only he would tell us the goals before we started the assignments it would not be so bad...I have to say the chapter started off fine with the fruit lesson and football... (It was fun to play with the dimensions of the fruit hat )which were a little fun but alot of times I wished he would give us a little intro to want he wanted to accomplish...and he did with the first two lessons, but somehow after that with the mountain lesson the good directions got lost...and I found myself wanting to just quit and walk away...but I didn't I just skipped over some parts that instructions were lacking-at least in my book...wish he would sit with someone while they were doing the lessons in his book so that he would know when he needed to elaborate more or have more pictures to help explain some of his steps....I think that these processes have become so easy for him that he doesn't understand how difficult it can be for newbies like me...I wish he would give real life application of when we would use these tools...seems like we're just doing silly assignments....and maybe they have to be to illustrate the tools but the tools are quite amazing and it would be nice to learn about it more practically and maybe have this chapter less dense....I really liked this book up until now....maybe he will redeem himself before the end of the chapter....

Lesson 8 Focus and Filters

This chapter was amazing and at times a little frustrating...
Sharpening the bears images was quite amazing-made me want to find all my out of focus photos and fix them up...The subway exercises were cool but frustrating...it was fun to take the graffiti off using the stamp tool, vanishing points and planes...making the grids was way cool-but adjusting the text was way frustrating-even he knew that when he said "good luck" finding the handles to resize and fit the text into the walls...this took the most time, but was intriguing because of the 3-D effect and working within the planes...cloning the walls and then moving them blew me away and thankfully this time he had good directions...so it made it easy to follow his steps.
of course, the best part about this chapter was the last lesson where we used the free-form distortions...this was way fun, fun, fun and again quite amazing and he had good instructions so that made it easy to follow...I was again amazed at the ability of photoshop to manipulate pixels....makes me want to buy photoshop so I can play around with images.

Project 4

For the picture of the head I chose Extraction tool to get her out of the photo. Then I checked the color levels and they were fine-this photo has good beginnings so I did not have to do much to other than tweak it some it make it look freaky. I chose to do a gradient and change the opacity in it to 16% to give it that cast, then for the style I chose reflect - again- working to give it an odd color then I chose the angle of it to 12. For the 2nd photo I checked the color levels and they were fine but since it was a little over exposed I went to the brightness level and changed that to -8 and then the contrast to 12 and I liked the color and it gave the gray sweatshirt more detail and then the only thing I fixed was the red eyes....
I chose the extraction command because this seems to be the most accurate tool for me and then I love the tool within it that extracts more and it is simply done by doing shift T to choose the edges.
For the text I chose red since it matched the lips-I actually did the color picker and chose the font to be the same color as the lips and didn't look quite right so I went back to the red font. I used red as it an attention getter color...I chose the leave shape as it is organic and just seemed to fit the best-I resized and made it a little bigger. I chose simple text so as not to take too much away from the zany photo but still wanted the text to be noticed-I played with the size a little but decided on the 18 font....I tried to do the letter vertical but that seemed to take away the attention of the "funniness". I had alot of fun doing this....in the future when I want to do composites I will keep that in mind as I take the photos so that I can have some wiggle room in them to add photos.

Lesson 10-Text and Shapes

Yay, this was fun and easy compared to the one before!
I did get a little hung up on creating the guides as he gave the wrong directions on how to set them up but found out I did not need as I was able to wing my way around...
I liked that he included "a dozen more ways to edit text" because it is a quick reference and I don't have to go through an entire lesson to remember how to do something...The shapes were fun too-I would like to get a whole bunch of them to play around with just for fun....the bending and warping are fun as well...creating the circle path is quite a creative way to do text- I am going to start paying more attention to flyers to see other ideas of how to use all these cewl tools...

Lesson 7

This lesson was both amazing and frustrating...the directions were not quite complete so sometimes it took me longer to do a part of the lesson. Amazing with the selection tools under the extract command because of its ability to choose more pixels after we have made a selection under the extraction...for example when I chose the hair I didn't quite get it to look very good, but when I chose the T command while I had the extraction box still up I was able to choose more pixels which helped the hair look more realistic-it kind of "painted" hair in but really added more pixels...The flame picture was something I hope never to repeat! Although it was quite an amazing result-I did not like the process, but I suppose someday I will use this when I am making a fortune off my phot0s....actually I do have to say it was fun, but I do know if I could ever repeat the process with spending alot of time doing this assignment again...doing the buffalo assignment was quite tedious-it took me numerous attempts before I was just okay with the final result and I have a feeling I will use the extraction tool most often when making composites...

Midterm Project

The first image I wanted to do was corrupt so I had to put these together....
I made copies before I started-and then I checked the color levels through the channels on the image of the little girl and the only thing I had to adjust was taking some of the blue out so I went the the Color Balance and did the auto color and it changed just to my liking I then went and reduce the highlights to get some definitin in the snow and changed the midtones a little as well and this took the blue out.
The first thing I did with the cat image was check the color levels and that seemed okay so I went to the shadows since this image was overexposed I increased the shadows about 30 percent. Taking this image proved difficult as the edges of the cat were very light and it was hard to make as great as a selection as they did in the book with the giraffe-I basically tried all the tactics they did such as grow, similiar and it didn't pick it up too much but I was okay with using the quick selection tool to choose him. I used the History tool often to go back and forth with the selection as it was at times hard to choose the light colors of his hair.
Once I saw that the selection was under par I decided I would use the spot healing tools to bring definition into the edges and it worked pretty good. I then cropped the cat out of the image and used the free transform to make him bigger to fit into the picture. I then used special effects and used the color overlay and then blend mode and used the color picker to choose a bluish color so it would match the snow and then show the gradiet overlay to make the light pattern look similiar to the way the light was casting on the little girl.
It was fun to use everything we learned so far-I made sure I used the color channels to get the blue out of the snow, I used the shadow/highlight tool on the cat photo as the original was overexposed, I used the blend modes for the overlays, the free transform to make the cat bigger, I made the images the same size, and I used the heal patch tool to bring definition into parts of the cat-mostly the edges, the histogram was my most handy dandy tool in that whenever I wanted to go back a couple stept I just clicked on it within this and I liked it as it showed me exactly what tool I was using-served as a good reminder for me, the magic wand is good but the magic selection tool worked best for me in choosing the cat. I tried the marquee tools, but I just don't care for these so I didn't use them, I used the cropping tool to crop part of the cat out as I didn't use the whole cat-he just didn't fit into the space that well so I had to crop part of him out. The gradients and overlay are a great set of filters that I hope to remember to use. I didn't have to use the saturation or hue tools for this, even though I tried them in changing the blue out of the snow-the better option was in the color channels. It was was to use the healing and patching tools in cleaning up the cat. I am glad I was able to use everything I learned so far.
It will not upload my image at this I will try later.