Editing the Nature Man
With this project, we had to combine what we learned from
the 2 previous tutorial groups to create an edited version of the given Nature
Man or someone we found online. The only conditions were that his face had to
be shown, and that we had to have blend modes, layer masks, and adjustment
layers. For it, I chose mine to be flowers, being inspired by the video
tutorial we had, and kept the man instead of finding someone else. I already
knew that I wanted it to be yellow and very vibrant, and thought that a sunflower
would be best in place of his hair. Though I slightly changed what I planned,
it stayed pretty consistent.
To use the required items, I used the blend mode Overlay on
the jacket flowers. Before this, I made a layer mask with this layer so that
they would only be on the jacket and not the background or his shirt. Overlay
was able to give me the best color and also keep the details below, like
texture and wrinkles. They were originally yellow, but with a color balance
layer adjustment, I changed them to be purple so that I could have
complimentary colors and the image itself became less uneven. With the head
flowers, I used multiple layer masks, patching and healing, and copying
different sections to move and have the petals I wanted throughout his hair.
There is some green I kept because I felt I had distorted the images enough. Also,
I used Curves to change some of the shading so that the various pieces could
fit with one another.
Honestly, my end result didn’t really match my vision of it.
Without video tutorials to follow, it was difficult to decide what I needed to
do to reach my goal. The hair was pretty similar, but it looks too unnatural
and doesn’t have a flawless transition, so I will have to find out a better way
to incorporate multiple photos into one. My jacket was changed, but I like how
it turned out better than what I was originally going to do. The yellow it was
happened to be too much for me, and also before I worked it out, you couldn’t
see any of the jacket’s details. I would also improve on using adjustment
layers and blend modes so that I am able to go even further with my projects.
Overall, I would say that I did well on my first challenge and can’t wait to
see where the next lessons and practice takes me.
