Photostory rough beginnings

A brief synopsis of my story is that it’s about a lone pilot who miraculously survived when her spaceship crashed on an alien planet only to find that said planet is inhabited by hostile soldiers, demonic creatures, and mechanical monsters. She is desperately trying to survive long enough to be rescued, but in the end she isn’t able to cheat death a second time.

These are the rough images before adding effects or text. Below is the order in which I plan to arrange them for the Photostory, but I would love feedback on what looks like it works or doesn’t work and if any images look like they should be moved around for a better flow.

Thanks.

UPDATE: based on Kevin's comments I took some additional photos to incorporate into this set and rearranged some others. I will be flipping some images horizontally to maintain a consistent perspective, but please let me know what other changes ought to be made.

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21a  (to be layered with 21b)

21b

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The worth of a picture with a thousand words

Original

With text and paint modifications

 What I did:

An obvious modification with text was to add the NaNaNaNa’s from the old theme song. I used a font that I’d previously downloaded from www.dafont.com (I highly recommend this site for free downloadable fonts). The font I chose is called Comic Book Commando, and I used the bold style. I increased the font size to 150pt and applied the Sunspots texture from the styles tab. This is supposed to have a gradient overlay plus satin, but the satin made it too dark, so I removed that part of the style.

I then created a new layer, used the polygon lasso to draw a jagged comic bubble, and followed that with the paintbrush tool to fill it in with white. I duplicated this layer and filled it in with black. I then edited the scale of the black layer to create an outline and a shadow for the word bubble. With another text layer at 200pt I added a staple action comic exclamation (BAM!) using another downloaded font called Badaboom.

Original

With text, paint, and filter modifications

What I did:

I created a new layer, used the marquee to draw a comic bubble, and followed that with the paintbrush tool to fill it in with white. I duplicated this layer and filled it in with black. I then edited the scale of the black layer to create an outline and a shadow for the word bubble. I duplicated these three layers and edited their scale for he second word bubble.

With each text layer at 72pt I used the same Comic Book Commando font as before--this time in italic style. For an added effect I used the polygon lasso tool to select the aqua barrel of the gauss rifle and the necron's eyes and applied a diffuse glow filter to these sections since they are supposed to have this effect according to Warhammer lore, which is what this miniature is from.

(I’ve been toying with the idea of a comic book-style set of images for my final project, so I thought this would give me a sense of how that might work).

Attack of the clones

Original

Clone stamped

What I did:

I used clone stamp to add a second wooden figure model to this picture. Some highlights and shadows were modified in this process, and I found that it was easier to use the clone stamp to remove some items from the background rather than trying to clone parts of them back into the frame. There are some sections where I don't think I should have used such a soft-edged brush though because I see spots around the feet of the cloned figure in particular that got a little blurred and there are a few areas with a bit of a halo glow.

Filters

I wanted to filter some untouched photos as well as some that I've already displayed. First, the picture of my husband that I experimented on with the dodge and burn tools in my previous post. Now I have also added a radial blur to the blue tube while leaving everything seen through the tube untouched by the blur. This added motion to the tube and enhanced my husband's presence as the primary focus of this image.

For something a bit more obvious, I took one of my previous landscape pictures that wasn't as successful and applied an Artistic palette knife filter to it. I thought this gave the image more of a Monet feel, which made it more interesting.

Before

After

For this sunset I wasn't really happy with how visible my neighbor's house was  because I thought it detracted from the sunset itself. I could have used the burn tool to darken this, but I thought it would be interesting to try out some atmospheric filters. So, I added a duplicate layer, applied the Render clouds filter, added a layer mask, and used the brush tool with black and white to remove clouds from where I didn't want them and to brighten or darken the clouds that I did want to keep. I thought the clouds gave this picture more of a story and added an interesting feel as though the ground had been covered in a fog that was either starting to dissipate or starting to build up as the sun goes down.

Before

After

Playing with fire...

My husband's face was cast in shadow in this original picture, so I used the selection tool to highlight his head and face while darkening the background and portions of the blue tube in order keep the focus on my husband.

Original

Dodge and Burn

Using the overlay method from our reading as opposed to the dodge and burn method, the lighting in this picture of railroad tracks on a slightly hazy afternoon turned into the light of a gleaming sunset causing the tracks to glow against a more silhouetted background without the haze.

Original

Dodge and Burn (overlay method)

Greater than the sum of its parts

I played around with the mosaic generator and made a mosaic of one of my favorite wedding pictures created using nothing but photos from the wedding.

Mosaic

Original

And here's another mosaic I pulled together of my sister, her husband, and their baby made entirely of photos that include the baby.

Mosaic

Original

RedOrangeYellowGreenBlueIndigoViolet

This week we played with color and light adjustments. Here is a progression of adjustments that I made to a few of my photos.

How'd I do it?

Auto Tone, Image Adjust Color Balance--added blue and cyan to the mid tones and shadows and added yellow to the highlights. At this point the vignetting from my camera became more obvious and was giving a bit of a fish-eyed look, so I also used the clone stamp in the upper corners to remove some of the more obvious vignetting parts.

How'd I do it?

Selection tool, Image Adjust Hue Saturation--decreased the saturation of the background to make my pretty corn snake 'pop' against the background. I also used the smudge tool to remove some of the more obvious sharp selection tool lines.

 How'd I do it?

I thought this picture could use some cheering up, so I hyper-intensified the contrast, color saturation, and color balance.