Working with photoshop

I was quite fortunate to have already had some experience with Photoshop so finding my way was quite easy. It is a very wide and intuitive program with a lot of options for fine tuning and editing images.

I worked primarily on the magazine advert with other group members.

This was the chosen background for our magazine add. I added this, and then proceeded to edit the levels and colour of the image to create the desired effect.

This was the tool I used for changing the contrast and brightness. It can be applied to an entire piece of work, rather than affecting a singular layer. I like to use this as apposed to editing specific layers because it allows me to apply changes I have made to new layers with little effort.

I used a solid colour layer which I then overlayed on the background to give the image more warmth. I then played around with the opacity of the layer.

We decided to use the image of the bike submersed in leaves, however, because the image itself was separate from the one we wanted to use as the background, this presented a slight problem.

I wanted to maintain the submersed look of the bike and with limited time did what I believed to be the best thing to create this effect. I cut the image of the bike out using the polygonal lasso tool, leaving a slight margin of the surrounding leaves. I then used a partially transparent eraser tool with the fader brush to smooth out the edges of the image. I then resized and dragged the image into the chosen area and used 'hard light', blending it into the background and subsequently merging darker tones of the image with the background.