Ashton

Picture Worth A Thousand Words

I opened up this picture and then I did copies of it with Shadows and Midtones then merged them together. Before I did that I wanted the midtones to be filled with 50% gray and the shadows to be filled with black. The Control I used to do copying was CTRL+(J). Then I made a new layer put the background white by CTRL+backspace. I added another layer put it white also and used my brushes with different styles and put random text all over it. For this I just put my name for the text. After creating the brushes I went to Windows, Brushes and changed my brush style. Then I went back to my midtones and shadows and ctrl A to select all then I pressed CTRL C to copy it and then went back to my layer with the words on it and put a mask on the layer and selected the second one and the CTRL V so I would have my midtones and shadows on the second one. Finally, what I did was pressed (fx) and went to gradient overlay and I used the green and red gradient and that's all I did to this.

I had to help near the end because it got a little confusing mainly at the layer mask. I kept going back and forth from the steps on the computer to understand it.

I really like the look of my picture. I struggled at this but managed to make it look good. I kept deleting stuff and undoing things. I think it turned out good and I really like the look of the red and green together and how it switches right by my eye and gives it this brownish look so it looks like the color of  my eyes.

Creation Of Choice

What I decided to do was one of my favorite books called Beautiful Creatures by: Kami Garcia and I wanted to make the background kinda resemble the 1st book with the tree. But in the cover you couldn't really see it so I grabbed a tree from mine and focused on the branches and selected them over to the picture and gave it a Drop Shadow to give it more of a affect to the picture and I did a little work with making it a little transparent.

I used the gradient for the background and used purple and black for it. Then I used a present brush and made the color a dim blue. I enhanced the photo with both levels and curves. The levels I just changed the white to 225 and the curves I set that at an output of -128 and an Input of 116. I extracted part of the tree from a picture of mine and put it in the background. I free transformed the photo to make it look a little smaller then it was. I duplicated this image and messed with the blending modes, I added a drop shadow and I just changed the distance to 95. All I did for the layer style was just add a drop shadow to the words. For the Text I used Monotype Corsiva and put the size at the top one at 30 then the bottom one at 24. Then finally I went to Filter, Render, Lighting Effects. I did the triple shot lights in the background to make it look like it's focusing on what I put in the background.
                                      Quick commands I used:
                                                 (L) Magnetic Lasso Tool
                                                 (E) Background Eraser Tool
                                                 (G) Gradient Tool
                                                 (T) Text Tool
                                                 (Z) Zoom Tool
I thought my end project turned out really nice and it resembles the book. I wanted people to look at it and not understand it. I think it doesn't make any sense which is a good thing. The cover on her book really didn't make sense to me so I wanted to keep it the same. I really like this picture I created and all the drop shadow effects on it.