Project 4- Courtney Acostagrates

Original

Final

Smart Sharpen/Unsharp Mask

On my image of some flowers, I first used the Smart Sharpen tool, and then applied an unsharp mask. I then applied levels, hue/saturation, and brightness/contrast layers to arrive at the final image. It's difficult to note the difference on these thumbnail images, but the change is quite pronounced when they are larger. I found the smart sharpen to more helpful because it offered more control. I ended up using 275% and 7 px radius. The tool probably would have been sufficient, but the unsharp mask tool helped sharpen up some last little bits.

Original Tornado

Original Sunflowers

Original Hat

Final Composite

Wow... this was a lot of work! I will try my best to summarize my steps... I began by removing the tornado and hat from their backgrounds. I used the rectangular marquee tool for the tornado, and the magic wand tool plus inverse for the hat. I separated the blue sky from the sunflower image onto a separate layer. I then made a new layer for the tornado and used layer mask to blend the sunflowers and the tornado sky. I then used a clipped a black -->clear gradient layer to the sunflower images so that it would look as though the tornado was creating a shadow over the field. I applied warp, pucker, and spin tools to the sunflowers so that they would look as though there were being blow around by the tornado. I applied a text layer to which I added drop shadow and inner shadow. I then warped the text so that it would look as though it were being sucked into the tornado. Finally I used the transform tool to flip and stretch the hat. I did "auto-contrast" and then applies a drop shadow layer that extends over the field. I *attempted* to make the canvas square (increasing the height) and applying the content-away scaling. This worked well on all the layers but the sunflower layer. It seems that I wasn't able to apply the transform to the quick mask channel, so there was a gap between foreground and sky that I couldn't remedy. Sadly, I had to abandon that effort.

Experience

I really had a difficult time with the Masks, Knockouts, adn Luminancy blending lesson. Perhaps it shouldn't have been so complicated, but I still feel like I need a lot more practice--perhaps there was just too much stuff going on at once... I hope I did the clipping layer right!I loved using the warp, pucker, and spin tools---so much so that I quite possibly overdid it a bit, but boy it was fun! :) I found that all were helpful in creating the effects that I had desired for the sunflowers. I also enjoyed the opportunity to transform the text and the hat. This project was really enjoyable for me because I felt that it offered an opportunity to draw from all lessons thus far. :o)