I'm taking a Photoshop class, and so far learning nothing new. Atleast I'm having fun with the assignments.


Abstract
So heres what I did for the first assignment, which was to do an abstract painting. I spent alot of time on this, probably the most time I have ever spent on a single piece of work. Pretty much everyday for 2 weeks I'd open up the file and just tweak it more and more, until I couldn't think of what else to do. The PSD file has exactly 50 layers, only 17 or so visible in the final, since I did a lot of designing and planning on this.


Fullsize here. 1440x887

here's the initial value study I did. A bit bolder than what the final turned out to be.


I was slightly pissed of at how just me and one other student had spent weeks on our paintings while everyone else literally did the equivalent of finger painting. meh.


It's FIRE!!!
This assignment was to just find a tutorial on how to make fire, and do it. I loosely followed the tutorial.

Here was the first one. Stuck relatively close to the tutorial.


second one I did a lot more tweaking with various adjustments and layers.



Montage
I'm not even sure if this follows the assignment exactly, but I could probably get away with it since most likely the teacher will just ooh and aah over the pretty pictures, colors, and cheesy somewhat motivational text.

Linked cuz it's HUEG

I'm open to suggestions on this one since it's a WIP.

haha, i remember that Fire tutorial. I also remember Meki telling me about it over and over again and he did a couple of photo manips using that tutorial. Very informative.

I'm impressed with that abstract painting that you did! Very nice. The texture and colors look really good and eventhough im not a huge fan of abstract paintings, there are some that really catch my attention. This is no exception :)

As for the montage, it really looks interesting, especially when viewed from a distance. It could work well as a poster, something that I can picture myself hanging on me own wall.

As for my two cents regarding the montage: Have you tried resizing as well as distancing some of the photos from the lower left edge? something like this:


I'm not really a fan of blurred out photos on these kinds of layouts, just coz maybe there's a bunch of them and it just makes it look like one massive blur XD Also for this style, i think sharp images or something with definitive lines would look good, seeing as how the rest of the image seems "clean" and spotless, i'd try to see if sharpenning the images will work. You could maybe even oversharpen them just to give that stylized crispy look (it might look good on your silouhette (sp?)).

Anyways, those are just my personal preferences. :)

very cool stuff, my friend.

the abstract painting rocks

Thanks guys!

Tube, thanks for the great suggestions! :yhappy: A lot of the photos are blurred from the camera not being focused. I didn't really consider sharpening them up because PS doesn't sharpen edges on blurred things, it just makes everything grainier. Maybe I'm just using the wrong filters :yow: Any tips for that?

Different sizes would definitely make it more interesting, I can't wait until I can work on this again to try that out.

Ah, yes I know what you mean. Are you using PSCS or higher? I did a couple of experiments wherein you could get slightly sharpened edges when you play around with the filters (Im using photoshop CS2 btw). Here's some examples:

1. Smart Sharpen - if you go to the filters tab then Sharpen, there's an option there that says, Smart Sharpen. You could play around with the settings there. Basically what I did here is select a section of the collage, copy+paste it into a new layer and did the Smart Sharpen thing. I kinda like how it turned out on certain pictures because it gave you that crisp illustration type of feel. Although it may not work on the more blurred ones or darker photos.


I also set the Blending Mode to Screen (or Linear Dodge if you want) to make it a bit more saturated and lighter to make that section pop-out. I found it interesting if you did that to certain sections of the whole collage, kinda like giving highlights to your most favorite poses, if you may =D



You can see here that I just randomly selected 3 images to highlight and sharpen. It kinda adds up to the whole composition, like there's so much more to look at or something. Here's the 3 ones I editted in case the above image isn't as clear:



I tried this on certain sections of the collage and the whole collage itself. The results were both interesting to look at I think.

2. Accented Edges - This is the other filter that i used. You can find this in the Filters Gallery and just tweak the options there. Its kinda interesting because it highlights all the edges. Since most of the photos have your body darkened out, the filter easily picked out your body's edges =D



These are just suggestions of course. =D

Thanks for the great help tube :yhappy: I'm using CS3.


Here's what I quickly threw together before class.



And something else I put together. Not so happy with that smoke. So I might remove it, then everything in the photo will be actually mine (I googled the smoke)

Cool :3 I think you're right about the smoke; looks too forced. And it may just be me, but the text on the wall looks slanted the wrong way, or something. >>; I do like the overall pic, though~

I think its mostly the look of the smoke. it looks more like a rock wall. Soften it up, maybe lower the opacity. or get a different image, i donno :P

i think what makes the smoke weird is that it doesn't have the blured out smoke along the edges.. so it looks like a block of something.

well, nice to see your works here. keep it up! :ok:

miffed your amazing! i cant wait for you to get taller so i can look up to you :p