Happy Halloween / Phun with Photoshop

Here are some festive Halloween pics that I Photoshopped for fun:

This was an image I used for my friend's Halloween party invitation.  I took a photo from his facebook profile, used Live Trace in Illustrator to get a simple image of it, altered some colors, then blended it in with a real photo of a pumpkin using Photoshop.  I could have spent more time making the light coming inside look real, but it was just a quick image for fun.  (Side note: the way the live trace worked accidentally made his chin look like a ghost - awesome!) 

This is me (in the center) and my friends dressed as the Incredibles for Halloween.  I used Photoshop to edit out the background, add a new cartoony background and Incredibles logo, add feet (our legs were cut off at the knees in the photo), and tweak a few other minor details.  

This photo and the two below are essentially unedited with the exception of the background being removed (and filling in body parts that were cut off in the original photos).

This is my friend Chris in costume as Frozone. I Photoshopped him on to Frozone's ski board from the movie.  This picture is actually a composite of about 5 different images - the photo of Chris, The Incredibles logo, the ski board, the ice, and the red city background.

We entered a Halloween costume contest for the tights/spandex website we used.  Please go here and click "Like" below to help us win!

Phun with Philters

Last night I was at a concert for the hip hop artist Drake (my girlfriend won tickets on the radio!) and I took a few pictures.  I only snapped a few and they weren't particularly good or clear so I decided to use this as an opportunity to experiment with some of Photoshop's filters.  I went the extreme route so none of these are supposed to look remotely real. 

This is using the Cutout filter on a picture of the stage and the crowd, with some coloring effects.

Here is a picture of Drake's house band and their shadows on the wall, using the Chalk and Charcoal filter.

This is the crowd before the show altered with the Glowing Edges filter.  In my opinion, Glowing Edges can make any mediocre picture look stylized and AWESOME.  Look at all those glowing human heads in the crowd!

Neglected blog!

Hey blog followers - sorry for neglecting you.  I actually have a few commissions I am working hard on right now so hopefully I will be posting some new stuff soon.  The Bootsy's New Hat poll is closed and French Horn won - the resulting pic will hopefully be posted later this week.  Here's an HDR to tide you over.  Stay tuned!

The reason I like HDR (High dynamic range) photos so much is that there are a lot of ways you can distort a single image.  You can make a photo look hyper-real or give the photograph a certain mood or feeling that it didn't previously have.  The image above is actually taken from the same photograph as Stormy Tree (click the link to see) - I cropped it into two photos and used effects on them each in different ways.  To view more of my HDRs, click here. 

Cleveland Gets a Bum Rap

Yesterday was a gorgeous day and I took some photos while walking around downtown Cleveland.  The titles are below each pic.  As always, you can click the images for a larger view.

In Da Park

Merman With Aspirations to Fly

Reflecto-Cleve

Too Lips

Statues Are Cool Too, Guys

In Da Park 2

City Hall's Rear End

Shaded by Justice

Ye Olde Courthouse

Walking on Sunshine, Whoa-Oh

Science, Wind, and Rock N' Roll

You Landerbrook, You Brought Her

Don't have much today - I've been working on a website for my boss.  This is a photo I took of our office building on Landerbrook Drive for the home page.  The picture used to contain a car, a van, two signs, and an orange post.  I love photoshop.

Click here to see finished website.

4 Red Cars and a snowy tree

I spent the afternoon working on some business card designs and on a website I'm building for my boss.  The business card ideas will be posted tomorrow, but until then you can enjoy 4 red cars and an FX-y photo of a snowy tree I took in January.

It was really weird - I walked outside and the world was black and white except for my car and the three red cars surrounding it.

Just playin' with filters.

Middle of Nowhere, Ohio

Haven't posted in a few days because this past weekend I was at Kenyon college visiting friends and singing with the Chasers.  Here are a few pictures I took of Kenyon's beautiful campus and the surrounding Ohio countryside.  Click any of the pictures to view them full size.

Kenyon's pretty church.

This horse was chillin in someone's yard.

Click to view this whole panorama of Middle Path.

Elementary school

Black Box theater

Someone's yard.  Awesome.

This one had huge powerlines in the shot.  No more!

Little stream along the road

Ah, America.

Many photos taken, One photo posted.

I took a bunch of photos yesterday because the sky looked weird when I got home, but this was the only one I really liked. It was originally a much bigger scene, but I thought the tree was a much more interesting composition on its own.

Sunny day + Cleveland Heights = More photos

I lied. This first photo was taken on Euclid Ave., not in Cleveland Heights.

It may have been a sunny day, but the trees still make it look like Winter.

Unaltered B+Dubya photo of a church in Cleveland Heights

I realize that my title is completely misleading, as none of these pictures look sunny or happy.  But I don't care.

Photoshop Creations and Misc

These are miscellaneous photoshop files I did for fun.  The first is a message from our President, made from a combination of about 7 different photos.   

I think Obama's second love (after basketball) is bumping (string) bass. 

This was taken close to CSU's campus downtown.

This is a cheesy "Self-Portrait" exercise I did for a class.  I like is the guitar image with text over it and the gradient, but the whole thing looks like something we would've had to do with magazine clippings in the third grade.

Just some practice doing touch-ups on photos.

 

A pic I took at a park in Macao, China last year that I recently found, unaltered.

 

HDR Practice

Today I shot some series of photos to practice making HDRs, or High Dynamic Range photos.  These were some of my favorites, shot in and around the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) building off of Euclid Ave.  I had to shrink the files down a good deal to get them to upload, so the quality is much less than I had hoped.  Oh well.  

Vending machine art.  Yummy. 

Any guesses as to what this is?

Poor bike.

  This last one is by far my least favorite of the bunch - I couldn't get the image cropped the way I wanted it.  It was originally a picture of a construction crane over the sunset, and somehow it got down to this.  I think the sky has an interesting color, though.