Photo Montage

The most difficult part of this project was trying to take pictures that had just the right amount of overlap so that the photomontage looked like a montage and not just a jumbled collaboration of pictures. I'm not sure why it was so challenging for me to take the pictures correctly but I re-shot 3 different times and got the same result each time. Most of my pictures had a huge overlap and that makes this picture look pretty messy. On this project I didn't use many tools aside from the move tool and the crop tool. The move tool was used to move each image into the correct place to get an entire scene from each individual image. The main way that this project is applicable to my future is that I can use the technique of taking images of part of an area, for a large area, to get  a panoramic view.



First Roll shoot

  angle up

 

 angle down

 

 perspective

frame in a frame

 reflection

texture

 Rule of Thirds

 Shadow

 

 

 

 Pattern
 
 
 
 

                                                                                                                Side Lighting
 



 

 

Using my phone for this project worked very well because, since its a newer phone, it has a setting where I can setup pictures with a rule of thirds grid so taking pictures that way wasn't very difficult. The most difficult part of this project was trying to get a good back lighting picture at the school which was pretty much impossible because of how everywhere was lit. no other picture was that hard to take. Next time I would try to take pictures in a location that isn't the school because then I should have much more control over the lighting and so I could probably get a back lighting picture much easier. The primary tool for this project was the paint brush which I used to touch up some areas. For example on the pattern picture the border was orange which was not consistent with the pattern present so I used the paint brush to edit the right pattern and colors. Learning the rule of thirds was definitely the most useful part of this project. Usually everyone things that the people or focus of the picture should be directly centered in the middle of the photo but using rule of thirds makes the picture much more interesting so I will definitely continue to take pictures using the rule of thirds.

 

 



 



Picture Resoration

 

 

 

The main and most useful tool that I used for this was the spot healing brush that, like magic, easily gets rid of certain damage to photos like discoloring, watermarks, scratches and bends. This tool can be used in a very precise area like parts of the jacket or over large areas in the background. Another tool used was the paint brush that had the ability to mimic the color of an area and allow you to color another part that color. This tool is extremely useful when trying to restore finer details like the eyes or the eye brows because the healing brush would simply blend the colors together and make such areas look distorted and messy. Next time I might try to see the difference in trying to use the spot healing brush to restore an area like a crease vs. using the paint brush. The most challenging part of the project was trying to use the spot healing brush on the borders of the picture. For some reason the border would turn a darkish brown color when I used that tool so along the border I had to color that myself with the paint brush. This has definitely been the most useful Photoshop that I've done because my mom is already asking me to restore several old pictures so that she can send them to people restored and now I have the ability to do so. 

 

 

 

 



Old Picture Resortation

 



 

Pop Art



The main thing that went well in this project was the versatility of the gradient map. It can be used to color the entire image itself or very specific layers or parts with very specific or custom color combinations. The most challenging aspect of this project was to make my layering consistent meaning that I didn't want one layer on top of the other in one place and in other the previous top layer being on the bottom. More specifically in this project I had 3 major layers  with each layer inside the other. Next time I will definitely make sure to duplicate my background so that if I make any major mistakes, which I did, it wont be a very big hassle to fix the mistake. Also I need to be more away of merging layers when I want to have certain areas of the picture being a different color. with the entire image all being one layer the gradient map colors everything and not a single layer. The main tools used were the gradient map to color the image and the quick selection tool to edit the three original images and only get the individual not the background which is a very quick and easy tool to use even though at times some areas needed to be refined. I definitely need to make sure I save my work in separate parts so that if I make a mistake it isn't hard to correct myself.

Face Swap

The stamp tool that we used for the face swap works well, the only problem with that tool is that it can become fairly difficult to accurately get the face without having all of the extra parts like the neck and necks that we don't need. That being said the stamp tool makes swapping faces much more simple than I expected it to be. The tool works very well because though there are some features that I'd rather not have the erase tool effective gets rid of those additions. Next time I would choose a better picture to swap faces with. I thought that President Obama's face swap looked pretty good but with Michelle part of her hair was on her face which doesn't look well mixing with Obama's short hair and definitive hairline which makes that face swap a lot less natural looking. The primary tools used were the stamp tool to get each face and the erase tool to subtract unnecessary additions added on by the useful though partially inaccurate stamp tool. In the future I know the versatility of using the erase tool to get rid of things that I don't want and to make Photoshop's look much more natural. Also with the stamp tool if I want a certain area to be repeated or placed into a different place I can use that tool to do so.