For my FINAL Photoshop project, I made a show poster for The Diving Captain! It was a really fun project, and the band liked it so much that they printed it at Ginny's and actually used it--needless to say I'm proud! I found the pictures of a cowboy riding a bucking horse, a fire ant, and a rope, on Google. The skills that I used to create the poster included masking with the Pen tool and the Free form Pen tool, the Brush tool, the Magic Wand tool, the Text tool, and various Marquee tools. I also grouped layers into Smart Objects and desaturated layers, warped text, and used layer masks.
...That felt like name dropping...
The Pen tool is old news for me, it was pretty easy to mask out the parts of the pictures that
I didn't want on the poster. The Magic Wand actually helped a lot in that part, masking out large portions of the picture. I hadn't really used the marquee tools before this project, and I used them to create a box around the text. The part that was the most fun was trying to outline the cowboy on the ant to make it look like a neon sign. I think it turned out quite well, actually! It was a little difficult to pick appropriate colors, and to make it look like actual neon, but I played around with hardness and brush sizes until I felt good about it. You can't see it as well from the picture on the web, but the color sort of fades out, making it look more like light.I hadn't used the text tool or warped any text before, but they weren't very difficult; it was very fun to play around with fonts, and I found the perfect one for the cowboy/western theme of the poster!
The rope was honestly the most difficult, and annoying, part of the poster. It was really difficult to make it fit in with the rest of it, because it was a photo, it stands out a lot against the background and the painted picture. I used a layer mask on the rope, to try and blend it a little better, but it was unsuccessful. The rope is the only part I'm unhappy with in the final project, but it honestly doesn't look to bad...I am just picky :]
All in all, though, I'm really proud of this project! I'm reeeeally sad to be leaving Digital Graphics class, though, and I'm sure I'll find ways to sneak over and do Photoshop whenever I can!!