Humorous Magazine Cover

I re-created a popular UK magazine cover, featuring Leo slurping away.  Fox Noel is in the dryer in a non-staged napping spot and was never harmed or at risk in the making of this shot 🙂

MagazineCover

Figured out the Hair Masking … finally!

Not sure why it took me quite a few attempts, but I finally figured out the edge refine feature, combined with a few extra layers for those stubborn final hairs.  Tward has a nice video that got me almost home, and I combined it watching advanced hair masking with the dude from PTC, Photoshop Training Channel

This is my most photogenic Golden, Becka, just the head-shot for now.

beckahead

LP5 – Photo Restorations

Finding some flawed photos was time consuming, you know, a trip down memory lane.  I ran into two problems that I’ll need to improve on.  In Photo 1, the dog on the left had total white eye. For expediency, I used a fast-paced fill-in re-creation that I drew while looking at my current Golden Retriever.   In photo2, the photo was grainy and when I cloned the sky to replace my thumb I needed to blend parts of the sky.  Not as easy as it looks, although there is probably a better way.

 1 – Before and After

orig-1

done-1

2 – Before and After

orig-2

done-2

Added Photoshop Books to my Collection

In the past few weeks I’ve learned several new techniques about selection, masking and adjustment layers. This week the focus was on  photo restoration.  I think the materials that Deke presents are fabulous.  I still like to supplement my reference are with traditional resources.  I added these two well-rated books to my library, and will be leveraging both for this week’s photo restoration assignment.

photoshopbooks

Duotone Image Rates 5 Stars!

For LP4, I took a nice rural, back-roads free photo, and converted it to duotone. Very easy to implement duotones, but you must have a totally unsaturated, b/w, monochrome image to make this work.  The easy to follow example I used was from

http://www.tipsquirrel.com/creating-a-duotone-image-in-photoshop/

I like a brownish, magenta-ish look.  Gives it that retro feel.  I was amazed to see how many profiles for duo and tri-tones exist in the PhotoShop library.

I tried adding a title and some gold stars to give it some motivational feel, discovering that adding text or embedding another image into the duotone image.psd, resulted in those additions becoming duotone also.

LP4_Schoepke_Glenn_duotone-5star

 

To work around this, I saved the .psd to .jpg, thereby flattening it. Then, I placed another .jpg file with the stars and text that were colorized and the two coexist, displaying both duotone and rgb properties.

LP4_Schoepke_Glenn_duotone-gold