Blog Archives
Photo Manipulation in Photoshop – Meerkat + Cheetah
My first attempt at inter-species photo manipulation, combining a meerkat’s body with a cheetah’s head! Wasn’t able to blend the colors right, but came close to it:
TTC Vertical Subway Poster
Designed as a TTC vertical subway poster.
Here’s an example of a poster on the TTC subway:
http://www.just-eat.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ttc-ads2.jpg
I based it off the Seneca winter 2012 ad campaign. The people, pigeon and Seneca logo were vector elements brought in from Illustrator. Original poster size: 20×28 inches.
Season Effects – Photoshop CS5
What we’re doing here is taking an image and recreating the environment to give the effect of different seasons. Original (picture of New York Central Park by unknown person)
Summer! (or I guess you could even take the original for this)
Fall
Makin it snow in Winter!
And finally, Spring (didn’t come out that well…)
Photoshop website mockup!
Created in Photoshop CS5. Logo created in Illustrator. Click image to view full size.
You can download the psd file here!
Photoshop Composition – Aliens Attack Watermelon?
Something I created recently in Photoshop CS5. Source files here (images and psd file)
[Click image to view larger size, redirects to Flickr]
Layers:
Casa Loma – Blending Layers in Photoshop CS5
Something we worked on recently, blending several images into one composition.
Source files: Download
Character Illustratation
Hours and hours of work on this illustration finally paid off today…I learned quite a bit about Illustrator thanks to this project, I really didn’t have any idea about using the mesh tool but now it seems like a very easy process.
Here is the original sketch by EriDaiho on Deviantart:
I started off with tracing out the sketch…at first I had a lot of trouble deciding where to cut off the strokes and which sketch details I should trace out. Also, I was worried that tracing it out wrong would also conflict in coloring it later. This caused me to close down some paths later on when I was adding gradients and coloring using the mesh tool. The part where I remained undecided on the tracing was the nose, which was drawn a bit funny in the sketch. I wasn’t sure of what the final sketched lines were for the nose, so I just went with what seemed to work for me.
Once the tracing was done, I took off with the mesh tool on the character’s left arm left arm. As I used the mesh tool, I found it very difficult to align it properly with the arm. This is where I finally figured out the clipping mask and why people always quickly trace out the area they’re coloring with the pen.
I wasn’t quite sure as to what the character really looked like since I never really played Assassin’s Creed, so I got an image and made a swatch with colors from that image to use as a starting point:
Amazing detail can be created using the mesh tool, and I extensively used it for most of the character…
By the time I was done, I would say 70% of my character was colored with the mesh tool:
On completion, I noticed a whole range of problems:
I realized I’d colored one of the character’s parts of the tunic wrong, and that the points where I used the gradient tool looked out of place. The problem was that the gradients were set up right, but not angled at all. I then angled each gradient in the image, as well as fixing some of the colors to make the blend in better. And finally, I had my result:
Without strokes:
Final. Though it turned out nice, the boots could have still be done better, and I didn’t really get time to play with the width tool on the strokes too much. The vambrace on his Altair’s left hand also looks like it could’ve been done better.
Alien Project – Style Guide
As part of the alien project, we had to create a style guide for our brand.
Click here to view the style guide for Enix!
Magazine Ad – Aldo Shoes!
hmm…magazine shoe ad for an assignment
I started off with just spending some time on the idea and what kind of shoes I’d be marketing. Browsed a bunch of websites, google search, etc. Decided to go with formal shoes and the main target would be white-collar workers, so I got a pair of them and took a bunch of pictures to get going…
I didn’t really like the look of them as I didn’t have proper lightning at the time, plus the shadows would’ve been lost if I had cut out just the shoe. The thing is, formal shoe ads almost always go for a simple classic look and you don’t happen to see much advertising for them either. Anyhow, I took another set of pictures later on in which I used a lightning kit and a proper background so there wouldn’t be much editing required. Tried out a few different angles to picture the shoes and stuck to one of them later on:
A friend of mine suggested adding a tie to the ad before my second attempt (above), which I thought was an amazing idea as I needed something simple yet effective in the ad which didn’t require going over the top or drifting away from the classic feel which I was aiming for. I decided to go with this picture at the end from the 3-4 I had come down to:
I started off with the 8.5×11 Photoshop doc, setting up 0.25 inch borders (guides) on each end and half inch borders on each end for the height.I inserted the image in, adjusted its vibrancy and saturation to tone it down and give it a retro type of feel. The image above also has the tie standing out a bit too much, it often takes the eye off the shoe so the tie needed to be toned down as well. Once that was done, I grabbed the ALDO font from a website, setup the type around the ad including a bit of info on the shoe and then started lookin for a good slogan/tagline:
“Make your mark” and “Work with confidence” were the only two that popped out for me in relation to the tie so I went with the latter. After adding the slogan, I noticed that it felt a bit too lonely on one end so I added these horizontal bars to balance out the image.
Contact me if you need any of the original images I took.
Audi Photoshop Website Layout – v2 :D !
Here’s the original Audi Layout we created in class (just redirecting on my own blog):
https://digitaleffectx.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/photoshop-website-layout/
A useful list of Photoshop shortcuts provided by my teacher (ITS ALL ABOUT SHORTCUTS PEOPLE!!) [for both Mac and PC] :
http://www.mediafire.com/?32eb6f1taoc8i4p (PC shortcuts – Photoshop CS5)
http://www.mediafire.com/?p9fo8g8zyz1t4pd (Mac shortcuts – Photoshop CS5)
Source files for this project (if anyone wants to take a look):
http://www.mediafire.com/?7cby1fa9tj9upsz
Second Audi Layout
The images had to be shrinked a lot to fit in the small column on here. Click any to view them full-sized, it will redirect you to my Flickr.
Here’s some insight on the second audi website layout which we had to create ourselves:
Starting off with the file from the previous project, I selected the center-point image. From there, I used a rounded rectangle for the top menu and added a few logos (to decide on one later). Used the stroke effect to get that gray outline on the top and bottom around the image!
Adding a rounded rectangle as a way to create round rectangular quick links at the bottom of the image:
Sadly, that didn’t work out as when I inserted the image on top of it, the corners looked terrible. I finally ended up using this tutorial from Matt Thomes so my image would instead serve as the rounded rectangle:
http://matthom.com/archive/2004/09/10/fast-rounded-corners-in-photoshop
^ If you end up using that trick to get fast rounded corners and you want to get the result on the same page, ignore the last step under ‘Almost Done’. Instead, click on your image layer and then click the ‘add layer mask’ tool which is on the bottom right and looks like this:
Once done implementing that, I tried to alt-drag and make 2 clones but apparently that didn’t work out as I couldn’t replace the image for each of them. I had no groups but just an image itself which served as each block. To get a better picture:
The 3 links are just images with a mask on them. Since replacing the images on the clones didn’t work out, I just deleted the other 2 and repeated the process separately for each one. The top menu seemed to have too much empty space and didn’t look balanced, so I added an extra menu there. On top of that, I gave the 3 bottom images a ‘difference’ blend mode on the stroke so they change colors as it goes from the grey stroke of the other image to the background (look at the border of the image) Once finished with that, I had my images and the menu pretty much set up:
All I did next was add a few text layers under those 3 images, add some final touches and make sure everything was lined up right according to the guides and the grid. Ctrl-click multiple layers, then use the selection tool (v on keyboard if not in selection tool mode) and you’ll see the align options on the toolbar under the file menu. And there you have it!!! Enjoy!
End Result
You won’t be able to see the image properly due to the white background. Click here or on the image for a direct link view it in flickr’s lightbox!
Digital Media Arts - Aamir Raza 