This week we were playing around with layering sections of images on top of one another, and in class on the Saturday we learned how to make a gradient mask.
All the images used in this lesson except, of course, for the Bluebird of Tatting, came from www.freefoto.com
First of all, for the homework for Week 2 I collected the following images from www.freefoto.com
First I selected the boat using the Freehand Selection tool with Smart Edge selected in the toolbox. I then cut and pasted it into the picture from Galloway Forest but the boat itself looked very lonely and didn't do much to the picture.
Next I selected one of the swans from the swans picture and cut and pasted it into the Galloway Forest picture. It still looked bare, so I repeated the process with the other swan, making a new image, selecting it with Magic Wand and pasting it into Galloway Forest. I cropped the picture, removing the sunset, added grass, trees and gravel edges to the lake with the Picture Tubes and then used the Adjustment Layers to alter the shading of the picture. Finally I added a frame to the picture by merging the layers, adding a 20 pixel border, select with magic wand, fill with one of the wood fills from the patterns, and do a slight Inner Bevel. I like the finished effect.
We went on to learn to make masks in the Saturday session. I didn't fully understand the lesson at first and made a mask from the cut out picture of one of the swans. It looked OK but I decided to add a frame which I did by again merging layers, adding a 10 pixel border, filling it with a gravelly pattern, bevelling the pattern and further enhancing it with a texture. I'm not quite sure which texture I actually used - when setting up Super Blade Pro I initially inadvertently pasted all my textures for that into the textures folder. It's given me lots of extras to play with though - one of the more productive errors to make.
Still not quite understanding the lesson I then went on to another picture and opened up Galloway Forest again. I played around some more with the opacity filters and adjustment layers to alter the tone, and opened up a picture of a tatting design I did some months ago. This particular pattern is from 1916 and very badly written in the original so I re-wrote it using modern techniques. You can find the pattern in my tatting site at The Tatter's Paradise
I copied the Bluebird and pasted it as a new layer into Galloway Forest, then discovered that by using the Lighten opacity filter I could remove the black background altogether and just have the lace showing on top so that the bird looked as though it was flying into the picture!
Suddenly I grasped the lesson. I opened up another picture from www.freefoto.com, again scenery of Scotland and a picture of a seagull from the same source.
I pasted the seagull as a new layer into the Scottish scenery picture, used the mask with the square gradient altering the angle and position of the gradient in the Edit box, then I used the Lighten opacity filter to reduce the background to the seagull. There was still some sea showing so I moved the seagull to the bottom left hand corner of the picture to hide it. Success at last, the only problem being that in the process of multiple saves the JPG has lost some of its clarity but actually I rather like the ghostly effect of the bird.!
