Unit 2, Encounters, experiences and meetings: Photoshop experiements

These are my experiments in Adobe Photoshop of two of my photographs that I have chosen to use for my illustrations.

Chris Ede inspired piece of artwork:

I used many different layers to build up this picture. 

1. I erased the background of the photograph and applied the artistic- cutout effect to the elephants

2. I added a plain background choosing one of the colours from with the elephants layer as the fill.

3. I selected a different, lighter colour from the elephants and used the brush tool to distress the background by adding colour around the edge. I also decreased the opacity of the layer.

4. I opened a picture of a tree separately and applied the sketch- charcoal effect and added the picture in. I then changed the blending mode to 'multiply'.

5. I used the same technique as with the tree to add in some bushes to the image.

6. I added an outline around the elephants using the brush tool. 

I like the techniques used within this picture, such as the cut-out effect used on the elephants and the charcoal effect on the tree in the background but overall I don't think it looks very effective and doing the outline around the elephants is hard to do to make it look good. I would like to use some of these ideas and techniques within my idea but change them slightly.

Miles Donovan inspired piece of artwork:

1. I edited the contrast of the original image in adjustments-levels

2. I then duplicated the layer and added the threshold effect to the image making the threshold level quite high so there was a lot of colour. I then went to select-colour range, made sure image was selected and chose the colour white to be selected and then deleted it. I went to hue/saturation selected colourize and changed the colour to purple.

3. I then duplicated the original image again and applied the threshold effect to it again but this time making the level lower so there was less colour but more detail. I then deleted the white from the image again using select-colour range and left the colour of the image as black.

4. Finally i created a background layer the I filled in another colour of my choice.

I like this design as it works really well and I like the effective it adds to the picture, such as the texture of the grass and the light and shadow effect on the zebra. I would like to develop this idea into my own work and possibly use it within my final piece.