Projects From My Photoshop Class

I thought it'd be fun to post two of the projects I worked on for my Photoshop class this summer.

One assignment was to choose a background and merge several subjects into it.

I chose a birch tree forest that I scanned from a book on China as my background.



Then I started scanning some images from a book documenting 1968 in America.

I ended up using

Elvis:




Jim Morrison:



And some creepy, vacant 60's fashion models:



And merged them into one.




This was done through the use of channels and masking to create the people selections, and a little tinkering with opacity to make Elvis' feet blend into the ground a bit better. I also cleaned the image using levels.

Another project was to choose a magazine cover and recreate it without using any of the cover images or text. This one was a lot harder. We could use images on the inside of the magazine, provided that they weren't the exact same photo from the cover. I chose Dwell magazine, another one that happened to be chilling around my house. I lucked out because the house that was on the cover was featured in the inside article. It was a different photo (taken from a slightly different angle, with different people standing on the balcony, at a different time of day.)

This is the original cover:



Here is my recreation:



The image from the inside of the magazine was on a two-page spread, so I used the stamp tool to merge the left and rights sides of the house back together.

I used the gradient tool to recreate the sky and the coloring on the word "DWELL". Using the pen tool, I outlined the original "DWELL" text to make it a selection. For the rest of the fonts, I just chose the closest I could find that were already installed on my computer. I had to do this in one night given my time schedule that week, so I didn't really bother making the text absolutely perfect.

The photo from the inside article had one man leaning on the railing of the balcony. I managed to take him out of the image, but I ran out of time to insert other people. If I were on less of a tight schedule, I would have found some people in suits to merge onto the balcony. All in all, I am happy with how this one turned out.