For this project, I not only cut and pasted a few images to make the scene scarier, but also used some really cool brushes for the spiders, fog effect, sparks, and spider webs. I used the timeline to make a gif, putting in keyframes on the light layers and an added brightness/contrast layer to flicker the lighting of the room. I put the brightness and contrast to the extremes so that I could just change the opacity on the timeline, putting it at 0% when I wanted the room fully lit and 100% when I needed the room to be dark. That was the one part that tripped me up since I at first had thought I could just put keyframes and adjust the brightness and contrast as I pleased, which didn't seem to be the case. I also copied the keyframes to the other layers and reversed the opacity on the brightness/contrast layer to keep everything consistent. Overall, this project was pretty simple.
For this project, we had to use the patch tool to take pieces of the picture that already existed and cover up the man from the original picture. I started on the hands, lassoing pieces of the sleeve and patching over it to make it look asymmetrical. I had to line up the edges of the sleeves and work from there so that everything flowed together and looked like it belonged. Removing the head was a little more challenging since I had to completely create the top jacket collar and the back of the shirt. Overall, it was time consuming but very doable.
This project was not as difficult for me as it was time consuming. I had a hard time keeping the steps straight and finishing on time, but in the end I got everything together. I spent a lot of time burning, desaturating, and trying to make everything blend together. I used a gray layer to add the shadows on so I didn't destroy my document, which was also really convenient because everything got shaded at once without going through layer after layer. For the words written on the wall, I hand wrote them on a separate gray document and used the vanishing point filter to make planes and make the words actually look like they are on the wall. I used motion blur on the raven and papers to make them look like they are moving, and I used an action to put my image on a CD cover. Overall, I managed to pull everything together and make it all work.
For the follow-up, I did the poem The Lady of Shallot, which is about a girl stuck in a tower weaving, bound by a curse that says she must never look directly outside, so she looks through a mirror. One day, she sees Lancelot and hears him singing and, falling in love, she turns to look out the window. Her mirror breaks and she knows that her death is coming, so she goes down to the water and goes in a boat that floats down the river to Camelot where they mourn her death. I incorporated the story by having the girl lying in a boat with lilies in her hair and Camelot off in the distance. I tried to patch out a dock that was in the original background picture and tried to make the castle blend in my taking a picture of trees, overlapping them, and desaturating them so that they blended better into the environment. The background picture had noise on it already, so I added more noise to everything else in the picture. I then used an action to put everything onto a DVD case.
For this project, we had to use all kinds of channels, lighting effects, and other tools to get the girls skin to look like this. I particularly had a hard time with this project in general. One thing that I had a hard time with was getting everything to look right and blend together. I know it still doesn't look right, but I tried to make everything at least kind of come together.
For this project, we had to use channels to extract the snow from the original image, which I didn't find to be too challenging. What really tripped me up was that I kept trying to turn all of the channels back on and everything was tinted red. The second day I fixed my mistake, and it was smooth sailing from there!
For my follow-up, I had an easier time and flew through it, especially because I didn't have something like the skateboarder to select and recolor. The channels worked very well for the seeds, and really the only problem I had was deciding how big my frame should be.
