Project 4 — Becca.

This was a comparatively quick and easy project for me, since I'd had more practice working with filters and layers than any of the other Photoshop tools before I started the class.

I found a lovely image of paper lanterns to use with filters.


I got the best results with an application of the Smart Sharpen filter. I tried various Blur filters but discarded them, because I wanted to keep as much detail as possible. Then I experimented with various stylistic filters. My final result, which reminds me of a bold watercolor painting, was achieved with the Poster Edges filter.


For my layered image, I decided to use this portrait of a girl wearing a hat, and give her butterfly wings.


I found a suitably large butterfly, and also a pathway lined with trees to use for the background.




Most of the work I did cobbling the layers together was in color correction — the pathway image, unlike the paper lantern image, needed a lot of color tweaking and once I had the layout framed the way I wanted it, I felt it was too busy and drew too much attention away from the model's face. Finally I shadowed it over with the same curling brush stamps I used for my last layered project, and set the stamp layer to Multiply. (I used content-aware scaling to make the trees taller, but with the effect overlying it, it's not as easy to make out.)

The wings were fun. I carefully cut them out from the butterfly image and rotated them to fit on the girl's back, and then used the Warp tool to tug their proportions into a more three-dimensional shape. I used a clipping mask to add a pattern layer to the wings, set to a low Opacity so that the effect would be more subtle.

When I was working on the layer style for the text, I discovered accidentally that framing the girl's face with a Bevel/Emboss style gave her a half-shadow, half-glow appearance that looked very magical, so I left it in. I also used Drop Shadow to make the wings look thicker.


I'm moderately proud of the result — I think it turned out better than my last project did. However, I think if I were left to my own devices, I'd remove the text; it was requested in the project outline, but I don't think it adds much to the overall composition.