Final Assignment - Magazine Cover

This is my final project, a magazine cover. The graphic is a composite of my husband's hand holding some carrots from the farmer's marked and some farm land on Hawaii. I used a variety of selection and masking techniques to combine the images, and used a very subtle blur/gradient for the background (depth of field). I had fun deciding where to place the cover lines and how to color them so they were legible.

Assignment 11 - Plugins

I used Extract plugin from the Adobe website to take the zebra from a photo I took at the Oakland Zoo. I like that you can trace part of the image and have the freedom to stop, erase, and start adding to the 'selection' more easily than with other selection tools because it is simply highlighting parts of the image you want to include. It feels a lot like using a paintbrush/fill tool in a mask but allows you to skip the actual masking process. For this assignment, I also attempted to download other plugins from the internet. The one I chose (http://www.cybia.co.uk/theworks.html) had an .exe installer (which I wasn't thrilled about) but it passed my antivirus software and everything seems to work great. To finish my graphic, I adjusted the levels, used the burn and dodge tools, and made some other adjustments. I painted the grass in with one of the brushes.

Assignment 4 - Color Scheme

For this project, I chose a photograph of a parrot I took while in Costa Rica. I loved the beautiful contrast of the blues and cyan with the yellows and oranges. I adjusted the levels, saturation, exposure, etc. For the background, I used a photograph of a forest that was also from Costa Rica. I adjusted the levels, brightened it, changed the tint with Variations, etc. Based on the color wheel, by adding the green background with the complimentary blue and yellow, the scheme I used is in the middle between a triad or analogic (as described on colorschemedesigner.com, because the angle is 90 degrees). Although the colors are bright, they all come from nature and bring out the tropical spirit of the photographs.

Here versions of the original photographs: