Kittens and Puppies! You never thought they would actually be on this blog

So I made an ad banner combining two different Flash tutorials.

The first tutorial was for the blurry flashy slideshow part. The other was for the text effects.

I used quite a few tools in Photoshop and Flash. I had to crop a lot of the images I used. There was also one picture that appeared almost black and white because of lighting, but I adjusted the saturation and color to make it more vibrant. In Flash, I had to convert every image to a symbol and then add a blur mask and a color adjustment mask to them during the transition. I aligned every picture vertically and horizontally. I used classic tweens for each slideshow transition. For the text effects, I used the text tool to create the actual text, then I made a black rectangle over the text with the rectangle tool, then I made another white rectangle at the edge of the black rectangle. I converted the two rectangles into a symbol, then moved it to the opposite end of the text, revealing it. I added a motion tween between these two keyframes. I double clicked on the rectangle symbol to enter it and made half the length of the 16 frame symbol inner animation black, to make it appear flashing. I then added actionscript to the end of the symbol animation to make it repeat constantly.

Photoshop Tutorial

This is a tutorial on how to put realistic looking tattoos on people using Photoshop.

Here are the photos I used.

 

to make this image.

The steps to putting a tattoo on someone are:

1. Open starting images (tattoo and person receiving tattoo) in Photoshop.
2. Use the magic wand and quick select tools to select the area around the tattoo (this is normally white space, making it easy to select.) Then select the inverse.
3. Go to Layer -> via cut to make a layer out of the tattoo.
4. Drag the tattoo onto the tab of your photo of the person receiving the tattoo.
5. Place it in the desired position through rotation and scale transform options.
6. Set the blending mode to multiply.
7. If necessary, use the liquify tool to make it seem to curve with the skin.
8. Reduce the opacity of the tattoo until it looks more realistic.
9. If you want, change the color and saturation of the tattoo until it looks more realistic.

Advertising for People Who Know Nothing about Advertising

I created this ad to advertise my chain mail jewelry business.

To create my ad, I first set up a photo on my coffee table of some chain mail jewelry that I had lying around my house. The two bracelets and choker are the first experiments I did with that style of mail. I put down black fabric over a book and laid the jewelry over it to give the layer that it seems to have toward the back right corner of the ad.

I first moved the picture onto the Photoshop document, since it needed to be 7.5 in by 10 in. It definitely was not, so I had to resize the picture to fit it into the required size. Luckily, it did not need to be cropped, so I had my base all ready to go.

The back right corner looked awkward because the ends of the bracelets stopped before the end of the page. I only had a normal lens camera, so the picture doesn’t look very 3D. The back of the bracelet seemed on a plane with the front. In order to create an artificial sense of depth, I darkened the right corner with the gradient tool. To my surprise, this created a new layer with all the non-black space turning white. I set the blending mode to multiply to let the picture shine through.

The jewelry I used was all silver, so my picture was pretty visually boring. Black and white, yippee. So I decided to add some color to it. I needed to ad the color from my logo, so that when I put the logo into the ad, it wouldn’t seem out of place. (It still seems out of place, but not in color.) I used the dropper tool to copy color from my logo and the brush to color the different rings in a new layer for each color. ONE BY ONE. It was very tedious, but it worked out pretty well. Well, once I set the blending mode to vivid light. Before I did that it looked pretty mediocre.

But woe was me! The color stood out over the gradient. (Now I realize that I should have just moved the color layer behind the gradient layer, but I was in despair! That idea didn’t come to me.) What I did to fix this was use the marquee tool to section out the back of the color layer (back meaning top, right corner) and then use Adjustments -> Brightness/contrast to darken the back manually. I darkened it in two sections, the one closest to the front being less dark, trying to blend it a bit better.

The black background of the original picture was very grainy due to low camera quality. I made a new layer and started coloring the black space black with the brush. I originally tried to use the magic wand and quick select tool and fill the space, but it was so grainy and strangely reflective of colors that it wouldn’t select what I wanted it to. Also I would have had to click the inside of each ring to select it. I reduced the opacity of the black layer so that the contrast wasn’t so jarring and the background was smoother.

Then it was time to add text. I used the text box tool to add a textbox and changed the font to some fancy looking script. I really dislike the use of ellipses, but it looked wrong without them. I was trying to come up with a better ad pitch, but deadlines hit us all hard. I’m sure it’s like that in the advertising industry, too.

I moved the logo from the tab where I opened the logo image and moved it onto the ad. It looked really awkward compared to the sleek, sophisticated style of the ad. I reduced the opacity of the logo in an attempt to make it look a little softer.

Business Logos are Hard and the People who make them should get paid more

I created a logo for a chain mail jewelry business that I started during my senior service project to fundraise for the project.

The logo is intended to communicate the idea of chain mail jewelry. Surprisingly, this is a radically strange idea to many people. The logo does this by featuring a chain made of circular links, the type of links in chain mail. Hopefully, actually having chain mail in the logo will cause people to figure out that the business sells chain mail. Fancy that. Just in case they can’t figure that one out, the logo even says “Chain Maille Jewelry” (maille being a fancier way to spell mail because it make jewelry salesmen feel a bit more accomplished in life) right underneath the business’s name. The jewelry is also hand made by me, so the logo also has the chain being created from nothing to illustrate this.

I only used blue and red in my logo. This wasn’t out of respect so much to complementary colors (obviously) as it was for the color meanings. The colors represent my target consumer group and me. I consider myself to be very willful and opinionated, often represented by a dark red. The product comes from me, so the spindle is red. (Disclaimer: Chain mail rings are not created on a spindle, that is a symbolic representation of a prettier object than a mandel or rod, which are used in ring creation.) My target market group is adult women, who I like to consider calm and composed. Chain mail jewelry is so often made as ridiculously colorful to the point of gaudiness. I don’t want to give off that impression, so I am trying to offset that stereotype with a classy, composed dark blue.

The most obvious design element that I used was repetition in the shapes of the chain. The chain forms a line around the business name, creating an irregular shape similar to a bracelet sitting on a table or something. The background of the logo is white space, leaving a stark contrast between the foreground and the background. The logo also utilizes framing as the chain makes a frame around the business name, bringing emphasis onto it.

From Rags to Riches... Except with Photos

       Nowadays, it's hard to come across a photo in a media setting that hasn't been Photoshopped or retouched in some way. We now have programs that make the job easy enough for an amateur to perform. Heck, even I can Photoshop something.

I started off with this picture,

and ended up with this one.

The difference between the two speaks for itself.

       When I started this project, I was told to find a celebrity that I wanted to paste my face onto. That was actually the biggest challenge I faced. I, apparently unlike most people, am perfectly fine with how I look. I don't think I'm attractive or even particularly feminine looking, but I know what I look like, and I like it. I ended up choosing Felicia Day because I look up to her as a writer and an actor, not necessarily only because of her physical appearance. Sometimes it feels like that's all anyone looks at. Today, we are surrounded by a barrage of countless images of beautiful people, but we can never attain that level of beauty. It's not real. The photos are Photoshopped and the people in them don't exist as they are pictured. But, for some reason, we expect ourselves to look like the people in magazines, on billboards, or in perfume ads.
My senior service project deals with body image and portrayal of women in the media, so I've done research on this type of thing before, so my perspective on ads and the media hasn't actually changed because of this project.

       One thing I did learn, though, was how easy it was to retouch photos or change them drastically. I thought they had teams of professionals to do this, but I could do it pretty well myself. The transformation of the picture was a bit ridiculous. Makeup, blemish fixes, and general beautifying were done in a matter of minutes once I understood how to do them. The final picture looks nothing like the original one, and nothing like how I look now. It looks similar to what I looked like when I had long hair, though, so I suppose it has to look like me somehow. It almost creeps me out a little.

       I'm not a professional, so my Photoshopped picture is definitely flawed. I could never get my face to sit exactly right on Felicia's facial structure. The jaw still doesn't look quite right and the proportions could use come work. I think the main problem with it, though, is that my face is completely crooked. I only realized this after staring at a picture of myself for a few hours. The original photo is definitely taken from straight on, but when I singled out the face, it looked like it was facing a bit to the side. I think I could work on making the face look more natural overall, too. That would take a very long time and a lot of different tools, but it's kind of the point of the project. Where it is right now, it kind of falls into the uncanny valley. You can't point out exactly what is wrong with it, but you know there's something not right about it.

       I think I did well overall. Felicia's face is very... multicolored, and getting my uniform skin tone to match hers on all parts of her face was very challenging, but I succeeded in the end. I also think I retouched my face well without making it look unnatural itself. The makeup, blemish fixes, and brightness changes made the photo look much better than it did originally.