Sequential Images

I made this for my final project in keeping with my environmental theme that I have had all semester. With all that happened and is happening at Fukushima I started thinking about the huge nuclear threat that we have created. I wanted to portray a sense that something needs to change.

I started with a NASA star picture. I thought the stars were a little too distracting, so I layered them over a black background and lowered the opacity. Then I found a really cool picture of two hands holding the world. I felt the hands were too saturated and the world not enough. I used an adjustment to raise the saturation of the whole layer until I like the look of the world. Then I used a second adjustment with masking to de-saturate just the hands. I used a layer mask to remove the black and fade the hands. Then I found the picture of the nuclear explosion, and overlaid a nuclear symbol that I had from the book cover design. I set the blending mode to darker color, and the fill to 69 to get that subtle overlay. Then I took the picture of the cooling tower and adjusted the hue to give the tower a greenish feel. I removed the sky from the back ground, them I replaced it with a blue sky with puffy clouds. I wanted it to feel as if the tower was emanating something toxic. I took the image of the fire and laid it over the clouds, and with a combination of a hue adjustment and divide blending mode, got the sky to look as if the tower is pumping out something toxic.

Hope you all like it.

Works Cited

Earth. Photograph. Innovations in Civic Participation. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. .

Fire. Photograph. Station 26 Fleet. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. .

Nuclear Cooling Towers. Photograph. Utilities ME. Web. 28 Apr. 2011. .

Nuclear Explosion. Photograph. The Real News Now World Leaders and the Real News Now. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. .

Stars-Nasa. Photograph. NASA. Avatian Queen. NASA. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. .

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Digital Enhancement

Before Enhancement

After Enhancement

I decided to try and take this book cover in another direction. Rather than the warm reds and browns that gave it the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom feel. I wanted to move towards greens, representing radioactive, cosmic forces. I also felt that the image filter I put on the temple was taking away from it. I adjusted the hue on the radiation symbol. I also adjusted the hue on the background, and reduced the saturation. I also reworked the title . I changed the font to a much bolder one. I also took the same flames that were behind the radiation symbol and used them as a fill for the title. I took the flames and adjusted the hue, and added a white color overlay at a low percentage to try and make them pop. For the smaller letters I sampled a green from the newly adjusted radiation symbol, and again added a white overlay.

Hope you guys like this version.

For my book I chose The Mystery of 2012, by Gregg Braden, Peter Russel, and many others. I have just started reading this book, but it seems very interesting. Considering all of the recent events, Tsunamis, nuclear emergencies, civil unrest in the Middle East, earthquakes, and so on, one wonders if there is any merit to 2012. I’m not sure if there is or not, but I find the topic intriguing, and it made for a cool book cover.

I started with a stock grunge background that I have used before, I adjusted the clarity, vibrannce, and saturation, to make it look even more worn and dirty. Then I found an image of a Mayan Temple and applied the texturizer filter to it. I also applied a light affect and changed the blending to color burn, I centered this over the peak of the temple. Then I found an Image of a nuclear symbol and masked out the black in the center and the arc shapes, and allowed a stock image of flames that I had. On the flames I adjusted the saturation all the way up by using an adjustment layer. I then found and added a biohazard symbol as a layer between the nuclear symbol and the flames. I adjusted the opacity of both the biohazard symbol and the nuclear symbol to allow both to show through to each other and the flames. I also added a drop shadow to both the give some more depth. I found an Indiana Jones like font, and added the wave effect to it. I then took the text and used turned it into a layer mask and layed it over a red to orange gradient. I felt it was too bright so I added a black color overlay at a low opacity to cut it down some. I then added a drop shadow to the words. I duplicated the process for the rest of the word on the page. For the spine I took all of the layers I had and shrunk and rotated them to fit on the spine in an orderly fashion.

The black space between the cover and spine I added so you could have some separation between the two.

Hope everyone like it, took quite a bit of time (again).

Tmess13Ph. Nuclear Symbol. Digital image. PhotoBucket. Web. http://media.photobucket.com/image/nuclear%20symbol/tmess13/radioactive_sign_01.png

Newscientist.com. Mayan Temple. Digital image. Http://tricorder.at/wp-content/uploads/HLIC/ee3021840914bf04dace04551075393b.jpg. Web

Warwick, Justin. Biohazard Symbol. Digital image. Clpiartist. Web. .

Recycle

First I found the Garbage dump picture in the national geographic archives. I took that Photo and adjusted the temperature and tint down to give it a darker, more depressing feel. I also brought the brightness down to make it even darker. Then make the garbage a little more defined I brought the saturation up, then to counter that I brought the vibrance down. I also brought the clarity down some to make it a little more muddled.

Then I took a stock photo that I had of grass and a blue sky and wanted it to feel exceptionally bright and happy. I brought up the lights on the parametric curve until it looked almost overly bright, so I could have a good comparison to the dark backdrop.

I also found a Recycle symbol on google and use the magic wand to trace it, I then created a layer mask from the recycle symbol. I imported the layer with the grass and sky to the garbage dump file, via drag and drop. Then I placed the Recycle mask on the sky portion of the grass layer to form the recycle symbol. I used the same procedure for the recycle word, except I typed the letters, used a duplicate of the first grass layer.

Then I used the feather option for the layer masks and set it to two pixels. I felt this made the words look more like a window into what could and should be in the place of the dump. I hope you all like it.

Finley, Dennis. Garbage Landfill. 1987. nationalgeographic.com. N.p., 2006. Web.
11 Mar. 2011. .

Photomontage

I created this poster as a way to bring awareness to the fact that we are ruining many of the world’s paradises by overdevelopment. I am in the Caribbean right now vacationing in Saint Thomas. I was inspired when I looked down the beautiful shorelines here and saw all of the development. I stopped and thought about how much more beautiful it would be without all of the development.

All of the photos in this montage are stock photos that I had from various web projects that I have worked on. I started with a photo of a shoreline with ominous clouds. I tweaked the saturation and luminance of the sky and sand to give it a more ethereal feel, by making the sky darker and the sand an almost other-worldly color. I then took a picture of the throgs neck bridge at sunset and used the select color range and the refine edge tools to remove the sunset from behind the bridge. I then placed the bridge and duplicated the beach layer and masked out the sky so that I could place the bridge behind the Water and make it appear as if the bridge was rising out of the water. I also took a picture of a large building and did the same as the bridge, this time I masked the water and the sky to make it appear as if it was coming from the shore line. I changed the blending mode of the bridge and building to overlay, to make them feel as what may be to come and not necessarily what is. I then added the road and made the perspective seem as if the road and sand went on forever. I also added street lights which I took from another photo that I had. The lights were off on the lamps so I duplicated the layer and masked out the bulbs, then I played with the levels to make it look like the bulbs we on and burning power in the middle of the day. I added the grand central sign and kept the size just larger than it should be to make the image feel that much more cluttered by human building. I also added the dead trees to give it another layer of depressed feelings. I also kept the bridge and building much larger than the perspective of the road to give them a colossal looming feeling.

I hope everyone enjoys my work. I put quite a bit of time into it.

one of my favorite pictures

This is one of my favorite pictures. I took this with a simple Sony point and shoot. I was staying in a family friend's house in Saint Thomas just off of Coki Beach, great place, I love it there.
It could use some photoshoping, that is one of the things I would like to work on throughout this class.