Final Project: Magazine Cover

Here is my final magazine cover. I used artwork (which I painted), cropped it, and added a border. Since I was making it in the style of an old poster cover, I really minimized the type, trying to make it as unobtrusive as possible. I chose to make my own "Food & Wine" logo instead of using the modern version. I added the date (monthly issue) and price on the bottom. I emphasized the author's name instead of the title of the article featured on the cover, to stay true to the standards of old poster style covers. The article is made up, however, it is an idea that Michael Pollan discusses in his book, In Defense of Food.

I chose to use the monochromatic painting, and strictly a white background with black border and print for a very elegant and sophisticated look- just like the target audience which would be likely to read such a publication. I experimented with white type over the illustration, but it drew too much attention to the words, which are not the focus of the cover.

Text Masks and Pop Dots

Two really cool techniques.

Composite

For this assignment I used my own images to build a layered composition. I started with the image of the ocean and duplicated it. I copied a portion of the rock, added the little shack, then placed the portion of the rock on top of the shack. This created some depth. I then added depth of field by creating a gradient mask, added a picture of myself (cut out with a mask) and added a gradient over all the layers to darken the sky, and the mood. I am very happy with how this turned out, it may be the most natural looking composite I've made yet.

Masks, Part 2

Using color range and quick mask mode I was able to select Chilly from the above picture, and add him to a pic of La Jaconde (Mona Lisa) at the Louvre. It was pretty easy using this technique to create a selection, it was much harder trying to make the composition look natural...I could still use some practice.

I did my best to match the look of the pictures by trying just about every filter and effect possible. I ended up copying the selection of Chilly and filling it with white, then adding a gradient overlay to that and reducing the opacity.

Extract Plugin

This is a quick composite I made to play around with the Extract plugin I installed for Photoshop CS4. I used the tool to cut out a banyan tree from one photo, and combine it with a photo of my friends walking through the woods off the coast of BC. It's a pretty cool tool in theory, but I think I ended up spending more time trying to clean up the edges than I would've had I used some other means of cutting it out.

Surrealism

This was pretty tough for me. I thought about what to do for a long time, and in the end decided I should just start working and see where it takes me. Here is where I ended up:

I really liked using the pen tool. I used it to cut out the image of the man (my friend, Dan), then used it to cut out the image of the person going down a slide, and then again to draw the ladder. It is a little hard to tell when the image is small, but I applied a filter to the image of Dan to make it look less like a photo. I color matched the balloons in the background and the small people to colors which I picked from Dan's cheek.

Healing

This is the second part of our healing/retouching assignment. This was pretty cool. I took an old photo of my boyfriend when he was in elementary school that his mother recently gave to him. It's in pretty bad shape. There are corners ripped off and it's all kinds of creased and torn. I cropped just a section of it and fixed the tears and creases as best I could:

Retouching a Face

This is something that I really wanted to learn how to do, so I tried retouching on a few different pictures to get some much needed practice.

Here is the original for my first attempt.....



...and the finished version....



I tried to remove some of the deep shadowing on the face, I whitened the teeth, and darkened the background (mostly on the edges/corners to draw the focus towards the face of the main subject). Then I added a layer on top: overlayed white, reduced opacity to 4%. I am pretty happy with this one.

Here is the original for another attempt...



...and the final, in which I again removed some shadows from the face, added some highlights, and darkened the background. I am pretty satisfied with this one, and I like how the final portrait looks a little stylized.