Photoshop Projects

In this project, we experimented with opacity and layers. We began with the picture of the school, added the compass, and then put the school name in front of that. Both the compass and the words are at a 70% opacity with a Soft-Light blend. I transformed and moved each picture to where i wanted it, only cropping out a little of the original school photo. My initial problem was figuring out how to stretch the words so that they fit the picture without warping them. I was also afraid the opacity might be too might and that the white clouds might make the letters unreadable but ended up working out.

Here, we used a text mask in a new layer and created our own custom color. We used the empty space so that the picture showed through and put a very thin white border around the words for a better effect. While this project was hard for me to figure out due to all the new effects I was trying, I'm very happy with the end result!

In this project, we took an average monarch and recolored it using a tool we call the "magic wand." It lets you select a specific area. The tricky part was getting the entire area we needed. I decided to continually adjust the color from the inside out. I wanted the effect to be that it seemed as if the colors were gradually changing, going from blue to a lighter green, blending into yellow, orange, and red on the tips. As hard as this project was, it's really one of my favorites. The wings did not start out like they are here. I had to figure out how to use the copy stamp tool and trailed it along the edge of the wing to create another layer so that it looked like the butterfly was fluttering its wings or flying.

This, Project Four, was the biggest and combined everything we'd learned about Photoshop. It was tedious but I learned a lot. This time, we used to copy stamp tool again but to subtract and erase instead of adding to the picture. There were originally two light poles by the school but we used that copy stamp tool to copy the area around the light poles so we could blot them out.  Then we turned it into  a collage, using various pictures of different area of the school to copy them in. We used opacity and a layer mask to paint black around the edges so that they seems to fad into the background. I learned so much about Photoshop and it was amazing!