30 day challenge: Day 4

For today, I went back and found a senior picture of Corey to mess with. I experimented with several different things, so it was a fun day.

First, I made a background by adding circular gradients, creating a gray circle slowly transitioning into the black. I added several of these, so the background appears more gray than black.

Next, I added Corey's photo and masked out the background. After that, I used an adjustment layer to darken the image and add more contrast.

The next part was probably the most useful. In photoshop, there are custom shapes. When I looked at them, there were only about 15. Then, I loaded all of them. Now I have the option of adding all types of shapes to my image. The shape I used was called Registration Target 2. It pretty much created a circular pattern where rays came off from the center. I put that directly behind Corey and masked out several parts of it.

Another beneficial thing from this was the brushes I downloaded. I got some pretty sweet grunge brushes and spray paint. I used this to add some grunge around the edges of the photo. The last two steps were pretty easy: added a gradient map to drop the colors but to add contrast and a hue saturation layer to give the whole photo a color.

Tomorrow, I'm starting a little project, and the first part will actually be text related and not photos, something I really don't have much experience with. It should be a fun process.