Week 10 - Cloning and Text Tools

I've used the cloning tool many times before, but I never knew about the various options available on the cloning window before; I even showed them to my wife and chances are they'll make her work life a lot easier. I chose 4 images to play with for this assignment.

&
In this first one, I chose to create a double rainbow by positioning my cloning tool at the base of the existing rainbow, turning my overlay option on, reducing the second one's size slightly, and increasing the angle slightly as well. You may notice that I duplicated one tree, deleted another, took out the power line and pole, and lightened the entire sky to the left of my second rainbow.

&
This one isn't as clean as it could be, but I thought it would be nice to fill in this picture with more palm trees. I created three different cloning sources, each one a different tree. Then I made each one slightly smaller than their originals and using the overlay again I four news trees to the image. Next I used the magic lasso tool to delete any sky that was cloned next to the trunks, which created a strange glow. I would have done more to the light (or dark) spots between the leaves, but...

&
I thought it would be fun to remove the cat-strap from this picture. This one was all about turning off the aligned option. I wanted to preserve the ear piece's reflection as well as the chair's, so I had to be careful both not to clone over them or clone them elsewhere in the image.

&
I thought this photo was a good example of removing items that blocked one's subject. In this one, I cloned my wife's hair to get rid of the fern, cloned some of her sweat jacket to cover a leaf, and cloned her hand to cover some twigs.

& &

Even though I played with some of the text styles, I prefered to use the clone tool for my text styles instead. In all three of these photos I created my text, opened a new layer, then used the Load Selection option under Select select the shape of my text. Next, with All Layers selected, I cloned either the leaves or petals of my photos and, still on my new layer, applied them to my selected area. I really like how this comes out. In the case of my final picture, I rotated the text and applied some warping settings so that it appeared to become smaller as it rose up the trunk.

Week 9 - Burn, Dodge, and Filter

Sorry this is kind of late in the week. I was toying around with the burn and dodge tools this week and discovered I overuse them. Every time I tried to adjust a photo, the result would come out much worse than its original. Frustration would take over and I'd move on to a different picture. Finally I showed my wife some of my trials and she suggested I use it to accent existing shadows and highlights rather than use it to control brightness and darkness, which was my problem. I played around with this concept and adjusted this flower photo. The adjusted one on the left gives the appearance of sun coming through the tree branches whereas the original appears dark and drab.

Next I chose a handful of pictures and tried out a variety of filters. The first one here is my little friend, the red eft, still hiding under his mushroom. After a few trials, came across the graphic pen tool on page 320 of our book and thought it would make the picture look like a block from a comic, but this didn't really happen. However, I really like how it makes the picture look as though it had been sketched. I can't recall the settings I chose on this one, but I think I decreased the size of the stokes and darkened the brightness some.

This second picture was taken about a week ago; it was taken looking up through a spiral of birch bark on the truck of a birch tree. There were a number of pictures I thought would look good with the glowing edges filter, but somehow this one stuck out the most for me. In fact, I stared at it for so long I began to see the name Obama in it. Can anyone else see that? On this one I changed the edge width to 6 and softness to 2.

Last, I really wanted to include my kitty and began searching for a filter that preserved her beauty and made her look as though she were painted. Again, using the book I found the angled strokes filter on page 319. I really like how this filter softened her fur (I never thought Sasha's fur could ever look softer than it already does). I made the direction balance about even, then increased my stroke length and sharpness.