Poster Pictures

 "Eternity" ....... Rexburg, ID. f-stop: 5.0 shutter: 1/100 sec. Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi.

"Family" 10/31/10 3:10 pm. Cokeville, WY. f-stop: 4.0 shutter: 1/318 sec. Canon PowerShot S3 IS.

These pictures were SO fun to edit! The temple one was had pretty simple edits. I enhanced the saturation quite a bit so when it printed the colors would be very vibratant. Then I added some border effects. I used a flexible vinette, and then went into the settings and set the "mode" to overlay, instead of normal, which is the "see through" border that makes the colors look even more so intensified. Then I added a white border on top of that as well to add to the contrast. Then I added in the text and fun shapes. It took me a lot of messing around to finally decide on something I really liked, but I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

The "Family" picture had a lot more editing going on. In the original picture, there was a cat to the right of the family, and the little boy on the left wasn't looking back. I took another picture where he was looking back, and I used the quick-selection tool to copy him from that image and pasted him into this one, and took some time to blend the arms of him and his sister so it looked original. I also added a little bit of a shadow under his feet, because it looked weird without one, because all the others had shadows. To get rid of the cat (and the original image of the little boy not turned around) I used the "content-aware" tool that is new to CS5 Photoshop. I just traced around the part I wanted to be gone, and when I hit enter, it filled it in very nicely. What a neat trick, and one that saves A LOT of time!! After lots of thinking, and counseling with my peers and teacher, I decided to get rid of some of the signs, and whatnot from the original picture. They just added lots of busy distracting details. So using the clone stamp, I cloned other parts of the picture to get rid of the parts I didn't want. One example would be the cattle guard. I got rid of it, and made it look like the dirt road just went forever. I also added in some bushes by the fences to balance the picture more. Then I added a Gaussian blur, and used a layer mask to mask out the people, so they were still clear and in focus. (Oh, and I obviously desaturated the picture to get the black and white effect...) And finally, I added the text and shapes. When using type it's best to use contrasting fonts and colors. I really liked the fonts I found, and how they symbolized what the words were. The word "together" is written in a script font that connects the letters "together". :) Then the word "Forever" is in a very simple, yet contrasting font, and the color is changed to white instead of black. Forever being white adds a lot of meaning to the words. I really liked the way this picture turned out, and I can't wait to give it to them for Christmas!! :)

Original pictures used to create the above "Family" picture: