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.