Photoshop Challenge 1

Final Image

When I was given the original image of the man, my idea was to make the portrait dark and creepy. I thought a dark forest for the background would fit that idea. The original idea was expanded upon after I began working in Photoshop. When I first started working in Photoshop, the first thing I did was make a mask to remove the original background. Then I set the background to a dark forest from unsplash.com. Next, I used a second mask to put a forest onto the jacket. Then, I duplicated the man and used blending options create an effect where the man looks more pale and his hair, eyes, mouth, shadows, etc. were darker. After that, I used adjustment layers and blending modes to darken the image and change the contrast a bit. The end result looked better than I expected and fit my vision pretty well.

Photoshop Lessons

Content Aware Fill

Clone Stamp and Healing Brush

Spot Healing Brush

Patch Tool

Building a Portrait Collage

Reflection

The assignment I was tasked with was to watch a series of tutorials and replicate what the guy does in the video in Photoshop. The process of creating the Photoshop images started with watching the tutorial on how to use the content aware fill feature. Then, I used content aware fill on 4 images. I had to get rid of random things in the background for 2 of them. For the surfboard images, for one of them I had to get rid of the logo and for the second one, I had to move the logo higher on the surfboard.

Then, I had to use clone stamp and the healing brush to remove a tag from clothes. In another image, I had to remove a pole from the background. The clone stamp duplicates parts of an image and blends it in somewhere else. The healing tool can help match the textures of an area with the texture of somewhere else. Next, I used the spot healing brush to remove the blemishes from a kid's face. I also blurred areas that the spot healing brush didn't work on. The spot healing brush is a very simple version of the healing brush. Lastly, I learned the patch tool. It's a very useful tool for blending. In the tutorial, I had to remove a graphic off of a T-Shirt to make it look like a plain blue T-Shirt.

For the last tutorial, I was required to use all the tools I had learned along with some other new tricks to build a portrait collage. I had to remove tree branches from the background and replace it with sky, which was easy because luckily the background was blurred. I had to use content aware scale to stretch out the background to the middle image. For the middle image, I had to use a mask to remove the background and clean up some areas.

For me, the first 5 tutorials were quite straight-forward and easy. The portrait collage caused me to struggle a lot, but I learned a lot in the process. The only tool I already knew how to use from the tutorials was the clone stamp tool, so I learned how to use a lot more tools to my advantage. I also learned how to use masks properly, which is something I didn't even know how to use beforehand. I can apply all the knowledge I've learned to future projects to make my graphics more convincing and pleasing to look at.