Assignment Six

 

For my sixtieth birthday I decided that it would be fun to spend some time on top of Half Dome in Yosemite. In order to do that, I needed a wilderness permit. As I was waiting in line to get the permit early in the morning, I glanced over toward Yosemite Falls. The sun was rising in the east, and there on the wall of rock opposite to the falls was the shadow of Half Dome, my destination the next day. I decided that that was a great omen, and it was! The next day (my birthday) some family members and I hiked to the top of Half Dome, where everyone sang happy birthday to me. I’ll always remember this experience, and John Muir's quote restated my feelings perfectly.

Assignment Four

  The picture above consists of a background image of Half Dome in Yosemite, along with two other images---one of me sitting down taking a break while I was hiking in another area of Yosemite, and a third image of a full moon in Hawaii. Yosemite is my favorite place to be (outside of my own home) and I have thousands of images from there. As I was reviewing them, I came to the realization that Yosemite is predominantly a granite gray in color outlook. If it’s not that, then it’s green. I chose this particular photograph to work with because I felt that, with the fallen tree and Half Dome in the distance, it had a lot to work with. Since this picture has the granite colors of both Sentinel Dome and Half Dome, I decided to work mostly in the blue spectrum of light. The moon over Hawaii presented a challenge, however. (OK, so I borrowed a concept from Ansel Adams) I have a stock picture of the moon, so I color matched that picture with the warmer Hawaii picture, lightened it up a bit, reduced the opacity to about 50% and got a fairly pleasing result. The picture of me on a hike was a challenge to select and then transform in size into the picture. One glaring problem was my straw hat. It’s yellow, and although yellow is a complimentary color to the main blue theme, it stood out way too much. So I toned it down quite a bit. I’ve also grouped the layers, but that probably won’t show up once it’s converted to JPEG. I then added the text to the sky and played around with the text tool until I was able to bend the text around Half Dome. I then added my name, changed the font (size and color) and reduced its opacity.

Homework Three

In order to create this duotone image I began with a stock photo of a house at the beginning of autumn. The image came from a program called Photo Explosion. This program has lots of good stock images, and I found one of a Mustang which I felt that I could incorporate into this image. It was easy enough to copy, since the Mustang image came on a blank white background. So I selected it using (basically) the quick selection tool, and then added it to the house picture. After playing with a number of different locations for the car, I decided that it would fit best in front of the house. I placed it there and then noticed that, looking through the windows of the car, I could see only the original white background. In order to fix that as best as I could, I used the clone stamp tool and used the siding of the house as a source, stamping that into the empty windows. It worked OK, but I felt that there must be a better way. After I have now learned a few more Photoshop tricks, I now know how I think I could have done that step better. Finally, after I had that portion of the image fixed, I converted it into a duotone image. I decided that since the picture was an autumn theme, that a brown tone might look good. After playing with the curve in a number of different spots, I came up with this color combination. Looks pretty good to me.