Monday, October 20, 2008

Photoshop tools

I apologize for posting this week's assignment so late, but I was out of town for a few days and had lots of homework waiting for me when I came back. And the fact that I spent almost an entire day going through the chapters in the Photoshop book. 













I have to say this assignment has been the most difficult and frustrating yet... going through the exercises was not easy when some of the photos that I needed to use were missing. Anyway, these two photos show the use of the cropping tool. In the first photo, I captured another rock on the waterfront which was left out of focus and looks like it does not belong in there (it's distracting the eye). By cropping the bottom section I was able to clean up the image and keep only the blueish colors. I also resized the picture from 9 to 3 megs.
For the second manipulated photo I took the butterfly from the first picture and placed it in a second one. My intention was to place a seagull in the second photo could not find any seagulls in any of my photos so I just used the butterfly. I used the Lasso tool to select the butterfly, the Move tool to move it and then played with the seize and position until I found the current placement to my liking. When I selected the butterfly in the first photo I could not help getting some of the background as well, and to remove that I used a soft brush with 0% opacity.
That's about all I did to combine these two photos. It was definitely a learning experience. :)

5 comments:

Jade and Jay said...

I really like how you placed the butterfly in your "frame" picture; very thoughtful. A seagull would have been a lot trickier, but doable.

Rach said...

Alina - I really like the butterfly shot and think that it works very well - I think it is better than the seagull idea due to the smaller size and monarch's bright colors to the neutral color of the stone/cement frame surrounding it (rather than the size and coloring of a seagull). It can be difficult navigating through - it took me 3.5 hours to do my first one! I found some sites that helped and posted one on the discussion board, but it's for elements - it still might help though. I downloaded karen's tutorials and they ended up 'chunking' when I tried to view offline. Oh well, live and learn! Have a great day! :)

visualdigital said...

Hi Alina,
Really love the cropped water is shot, lovely. The butterfly is excellent, the colors really show up with a pop against the sculpture, great work, it sure takes a lot of learning, yet isn't it so satisfying in the end! Be proud!

Anonymous said...

Oh you did an excellent job framing that butterfly. The lasso tool requires so much patience...congratulations. I think the cropping on the water photo was just right too.

photography by lisa whitman said...

Alina,

Cropping out the rock in the foreground really makes the new photo look great. The water looks so soothing and calming. I love the new butterfly photo. You did a great job moving it from the original to the "new" photo. You should make a living at using photoshop. You have done a really great job in the other photos (I am going newest to oldest photos).
Awesome job!