Week 7 Manipulating photos

I have had a lot of fun this week, using Photoshop Elements to play around with pictures and add things to them and figuring out how to create some more just for fun pieces. The thing I have had the hardest with is figuring out how the magic wand tool works, so that it my ah-ha for this week. I also have really enjoyed using the magnetic lasso tool. My six year old helped me design an invitation for his grandparents for dinner last night, which was a lot of fun; I love anything that gets the boys interested in art.

So this is the original photo I took during week 4 of the dull dreary field across from our house.

And this is what I turned it into, I first I used the polygonal lasso to cut out the farm from last week's landscape assignment. Than I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut the road from last week's street lamp photo and added it. If you look really close at the farm you'll see that I used the marquee tool and the magnetic lasso to add my sons' faces or eyes to the windows so it looks like they're peeking out. I took the lovely blue sky from a landscape shot and cut it out using the marquee to bring sun to the field. And I cut the clouds from a different photo to add a little more realism to the sky. Lastly I took the eraser and tried to make it look like the sky fit a little better and tried to make it look more mountainous.

So this is a lovely picture of my baby sister from her wedding day. The first thing I did was make a copy and edit it so it was black & white.

After that I used the magnetic lasso to cut her out of the color photo and dropped her in the one with the b&w background. I then used the magic wand to take a hint of the greenery from behind her and added it to the back ground of the b&w one. I had a lot of fun doing this, being able to colorize pieces of a b&w photo was on of my goals to learn when I signed up for this class. Finally I cropped it so she fit more in the rule of thirds.

So this is what I ended up with and after a little touch up with the eraser I am very pleased how it came out.

Lastly I wanted to learn more about the magic wand and tolerances, so I took this picture of the rose my husband gave me the week we did micro shots and started first by taking a higher number on the tolerance setting and moved it to a plain black background, and continued to lower the tolerance as I added more pieces to the black background.

I really liked how graphic this came out, and plan on framing a matted copy for my bedroom which is done in red and black.

Just for fun this is the invitation Joe helped me with. I lassoed the boys from in front of the Christmas tree and Joe picked the background which he said was a "disco"! :) Then added the text cloud and wording. Printed and mailed out to Gramma and Grampa. Very happy boys after a trip to the post office.