Final Project: Designing a Magazine Cover

For our final project, we had to design a magazine cover. I chose to mimic my favorite magazine, Sunset Magazine, to display what I have learned in photoshop.

Project 12: Pop Dots

Pop dots are a great graphic tool to add texture to an image's background for design purposes. Here I took a burger photo from Pure Food Photography, a company I intern for, and made it a little more snazzy.

Project 11: Gaussian Blur

After walking around Paris all day, looking at museums, sitting in humid batobuses, squeezing through crowds, etc... makeup is sure to melt and hair goes flat. Thankfully due to photoshop, you can look as dewy and collected as you did in the morning.

In this image, I had been seeing the sites of beautiful Paris, not worrying about makeup and hair, yet when I got home, and especially now that I am looking at them 2 years later, wow did I need to powder my nose! Using the Gaussian Blur tool, I was able to slightly blur the image to give the essence of a dewy lens fogged by the morning moisture, and a soft glow effect. With a little adjusting of the layers, my photo is once again appreciated... remind me to never go blonde again.

Project 10: Photo Restoration

Poor Bluebeard, life handed him a couple curve balls. A bad eye, a big mole, and big scratches all over his portrait, he is not doing so hot... But that's okay because we have photoshop to make him look good again.

I first took the healing brush tool and painted over his mole. by setting a source point prior to this, it covers the blemish like it was never there. I then repeated this with all of the scratches, setting source points where it wasn't scratched, then painting over the scars. On one of the scratches I selected using the cloning tool, and corrected that way. To correct his poor blind eye, I opened the clone source palette, set the settings, clicked on a source point on the good eye, and then began painting over his bad eye.

No more looking like the victim of sun damage and an angry crow in the fields; onward to looking like the wise guru of gardening once more!

Project 9: The Pen Tool

In this project had to make a surreal themed composite image using a collection of vector shapes made using the pen tool. For mine, I used the pen tool for selecting and then warping various face parts floating in the sky with glowing cubes. My friend on the beach seems to be very confused as to why there would be such a thing floating above her, and rechecks the ingredients in her vitamin bottle. :)

Project 8: Retouching

This project was great because there are so many times when I am out and about with no fancy reflectors, bad sun angles, and I have a killer composition....if only it was 10am, with a soft light and the sun was slightly higher. Oh dear. So here is a photo of me in Paris, backlit, and my face was underexposed. I wanted to capture where we were, a great park surrounded by great architecture. By utilizing the dodge, burn, and sponge tool, I was able to lighten up my face so I am part of the scenery, and balance out the harsh lighting a bit better.

Project 7: Collage

I decided to do my collage on Jim Morrison, a talented musician, poet, filmmaker and artist. Jim Morrison died at a very young age of 27, due to an argumentative cause of either murder, suicide, or accidental overdose of heroin.

He, I feel, is an important topic in history because he made a huge impact on the world of music, as he was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone's '100 Greatest Singers of All Time'. I appreciate philosophical insight through his poetry and music, and can connect with it. I felt he was wise beyond his years, and had beautiful yet dark lyrics that were stunningly correct. He was just a beautiful person.

My 'message' in my collage just brings awareness to one of my favorite quotes from him about just accepting fear and what you fear, in turn this makes it powerless against you because you just did what you thought is the worst. You are still there…and you are free from it now.

The materials used in the collage started with a photo of me standing in front of Jim Morrison's grave in Paris, which being a fan of his, I thought was a very cool experience. This image brings in the truth of his saying, "No one here gets out alive". Weird irony of being in a cemetery, and a text layer in this collage. Another text layer is the quote explained earlier about facing fear. I also have an opaque layer of Jim Morrison's face, one of the most identifiable portrait of him, and also the most direct, strong gaze, one that looks like he is staring something straight in the eye….the roses are a memory factor i had of all the flowers in the cemetery, the symbolize pure beauty, short lived elements of high impact on the mind. The anatomical drawing of a man I felt not just looked like him, but it symbolized to me how he illustrated in his work that everything comes full circle and is infinite.