Image editing

Dual image Duotone

My first attempt at trying to create an original duotone with two images. When creating a duotone image, getting the initial image is the hard part. Once you have your images.

1. convert the image to black and white. In photoshop select Image, adjustments, then black and white.
2. When the dialog cox pops up. move the sliders to get a nice contrast in the image.
3. Optional step here....go to image adjustments then select curves.
4. Now you need to go back to the image tab select mode then select grayscale when the dialog box comes up accept. this gets rid of all color.
5. Go back again to image tab, then mode. but this time select duotone.
6. The duotone options dialog box opens. from here you could create monotone,duotone,tritone or quadtone.
7. Once you decide then click on one of the boxes ( I would start at the top ) also it might be a good idea to have the darkest color at the top.
8. Option here the box to the left has a curve adjustment to the color. Just tweak the curve a little, and see how it affects your image. If you get it all messed up don't worry just click (cancel).

The above instructions will get  you well on your way. Once the image is the way you like it make a few layer copies and play around with layer blend modes and effects.
     On my image I added a soft light layer and a curves layer.
When I added John Wayne and changed the layer to soft light. Then added a layer mask so I could erase some of the edges.
then copied that layer and changed it to dissolve.
     Finally on that layer I added some effects with the inner shadow soft light. opacity 34, used global light at angle of -48 distance 34px and size of 250px.

These are the images I used

Arches National Park

John Wayne

This is my image using to pantone colors

one is black the other is a sort of copper color

John Wayne at Arches National Park

I decided to another Duotone image.

I used the same colors as above, but this time I added a quote, along with a wrinkled paper effect.

Well of course, with a quote like that. I had to make a black and white version.

Lp 5 Poster.

Vintage / Futuristic Poster.

This poster was created using ( 2 ) photos. The camera image came from Pixabay, and the image of the eye is actually my eye.

I must admit it was a little weird working on my own eye.

especially when I was Dodging an Burning the retina.

The image of the camera was cropped, and enlarged. I really only wanted the camera.

I started with the eye. I seen a new technique at phlearn.com that created a futuristic eye. One of the techniques used was ( filter ) ( distort ) ( polar coordinates ). This was new to me. Than main thing with this feature is, your images need to be square. I used 7 x 7 image  size. once I created some futuristic effects.

This image also came from pixabay.

Of course I needed to crop it so the colors blended, and remember all images that are going to be polar distorted need to be square.

Pretty cool.

After Dodging and burning my retina. The only other thing I did with the eye was tweak the curves a little, so the colors in the effects would pop a little more.

     The camera was pretty simple basically I cut out the lens area. and adjusted the color with a curve adjustment. I was having some problem with the color of the fingers. they seemed way to over exposed. No matter what I tried the bottom fingers never seemed to look right. finally I decided to cut them out and do a duotone of them. This seemed to help in addition to a few adjustment layers.

     The quote was one that just came to mind while I was working on this project. 

LP 6 ( explore the brush tools )

This lesson plan was about creating a one of a kind portrait using the brush tool in Photoshop. The basic brush tool is somewhat boring. For this project I uploaded quite a few brushes from

http://www.creativebloq.com/photoshop/free-photoshop-brushes-11121140

Of course this opened up a whole new world of photoshop for me.

here is a snapshot of the brushes that I used in my image.

For my background Image I used a picture that was taken this past summer on Boulder Lake Wi.

some other images to add interest to the piece came from Pixabay, and the wikimedia commons.

     The first thing I needed to do was cut this picture off, at the top of the treeline. Then feather, and refined the edge. Once I thought the edge looked pretty good I started working on the color of the sky. After trying many options I decided to go with a gradient for the sky, As opposed to just black. Wanting to give the shoreline some structure. I used the tree brush tool on three different layers. So I could give groups of trees different colors. 

     Working on the sky I started with the moon, then added the small stars.Giving the moon some character I used the smoke brush turning the tip of the brush and deleting what I didn't want. That looked pretty good, so I decided to use another brush from that set and add some ground fog. The fog is two of the same images one is flipped horizontally. Then they are joined in the center. I tweaked them just a little with the smudge tool. 

     Before I went any further I added the owl. Once the owl was placed I could get the star brushes, and added highlights to the sky. Then to balance things out in the sky I added some small birds on the right side.

     The loon on the lower right fills in the area on the lower left real nice. Just for the fun of it I added the butterfly

     Almost forgot to mention the blending modes to get things to look right. 

The kayak blend is ( multiply ) The loon is on a ( soft light ) and the butterfly is ( overlay ).

Everything else is on a normal blend mode.

This is my final brush tool created image

LP 7 Original design magazine cover

     I did a little research on magazine covers, and what makes a great cover. The magazine needs to be appealing so the customer wants to look at it. Then the cover needs to promote people to thumb through it, and of course purchase the magazine. I think my design grabs attention, and the articles listed are interesting.

     I could do any magazine I wanted. I picked Photoshop creative because I wanted to use a lot of my own artwork. The first thing I needed to do was get a copy of the magazine. Once I got the magazine home I was amazed. The cover image on my magazine was created by following a tutorial from Photoshop creative. 

     Some of the challenges were creating the title text, and the barcode. I created both in Illustrator.

The barcode was relatively easy. simply find a clean barcode, and image publishing logo. Then do a live trace and clean it up. The title text was a little more involved. After doing live trace the letters didn't look so good. So I used it as a tracing layer and constructed the letters using rectangles, circles, and the pen tool.

     I got lucky with the cover story font.The two fonts use are Franklin Goth Demi for the large font, and Aller bold for the smaller text.

     All of the images on the cover I had created at some time or another. I just needed to re-size them and put borders around them.

     This is my finished magazine cover.