Mid-Term Part2

Mid Term "Beam me up Scotty!"

I started with this cute little wood frog, that we saw in Australia. I downsized the frog to 180 pixels and the Document size to 7 x 4 inches. I took the Wand tool and selected the backgrounds (beige wall and black chair) and then clicked Inverse under Select in the Menu Bar. I dragged the frog in a new created Layer (File/New) and took a snapshot in the History Palette. I like the bright green color but I will try to change him to a dangerous bright red creature. I increased the Hue and Saturation in Image/Adjustment and set Shadows in Shadow/Highlight to 61% to get a poisonous looking creature. Now I have to clean up a few pink spot on his body with the Spot Brush tool. I used the Crop tool to rotate "Kermit" and then I flipped him horizontally under Image/Rotate Canvas, so I know he is looking down to the left side.

My next animal is the sheep "Dolly" and clicked on Auto Color to give this image a bit more depth and contrast. I want to make the lawn (background) more colorful, so there will be more contrast from sheep to background and the Wand tool will be faster to select the sheep. I changed the grass color to magenta with the Saturation in the Hue/Saturation command. That is a wonderful tool to make quick color changes to keep the brilliance and details of an image. Then I took the Wand tool and selected the sheep, playing with the Tolerance from 30-50 and dragged the sheep finally to a new white canvas which I created under File/New. The back leg was not fully selected so I took the Lasso and selected both the front and back legs and dragged it over to the new canvas. I cleaned up the silhouette with a white Brush and over-painted the big black shadow next to its face. The Image had a light red haloing at its feet, so I then chose the Inner Glow Style in the Layers Palette, set the Blend Mode to Color and reduced the Opacity to 50. I displayed the Color Picker, clicked with the appearing cursor into the sheep’s fur and clicked OK. Dolly was still missing her left front leg (buried in the original shadow that was erased), so I selected the right front leg with Lasso, then copied and pasted it into the left position. With the Brush tool I gave the new foot a thinner (more distant) shape, enlarged her chest and with the Healing Brush I healed her fur from shiny glittery spots which she still had from the selecting with the Wand tool. But I had a hard time to give her more depth because Dolly is a white sheep. I should have chosen a colored one, maybe a blue one!! I used the crop tool to rotate Dolly to look into the fishing hole.

Now it is time to work on the destination image….

"Waiting at the fishing hut*"

I downsized the image to 180 pixels, cropped it and clicked Auto Contrast and Auto Color to make the image more crisp and I increased the Saturation using the Hue/ Saturation command. I like the result. I moved the sheep into the hut using the Wand tool and with the Healing Brush I painted the back leg away and the leg from the chair under Dolly’s belly. Minor improvements…..
The window looked so empty, so I selected a Texture under Filter in the Menu Bar and chose Stained Glass. I filled the sections in the glass with the Paint bucket, selecting the colors from the Swatches palette, step by step. In color-sterile Antarctica; in a white blue only world, I was craving for more colors. So I selected Red Kermit with the Wand tool and dragged him over to the fishing hole where he is waiting now for a lunch to show up.

I restored the fishing line in front of the stained glass with selecting the upper segment and copy merge/paste in small segments. When I reached the bottom of the line next to my head I realized that the fish line moved one pixel to the left because of the current!
I chose to hide the error next to my head rather than in the middle of the stain glass which would have been more obvious.
Red Kermit’s little brother wanted to see what’s going on and he wanted to sneak into the hut following his big brother. So I took the same wood frog, cropped and rotated him with the Crop tool and then selected him with the Wand tool and dragged him over to Dolly.

Next is an Australian parakeet playing next to us at the campground at the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland. I resized the image first and cropped it. Then….I tried to create a path around the whole bird with the Path Tool but my computer couldn’t keep track of all the anchor points so I did it in six sections and then copied each pathway onto the largest one and named it Lori outline. Here, I really got into trouble—I could select the whole bird but I got several triangular lines outside the boundary and couldn’t drag the image into my fishing hut. Oh well, there is more than one way to skin a cat and a parakeet too! I then flipped the bird horizontally and resized it to 2.5 inches long and reduced the pixels to 180.

Finally…. I took smaller ‘bites’ of the bird (Path’s) with selecting the Pen tool, creating new anchor points to make a closed Path in small sections. I started with the foot, placing it on the rim at the fishing hole along with his friends. I transferred the body piece by piece and nudged each segment into place by using the Ctrl-key and Arrow-Key and ‘lost’ the proportions which got me into a bit of trouble again—however with a little patience the bird was whole again and sitting next to his friends….

My oh my, how hard it was to coax that bird into the fishing hut in Antarctica!

The Rhinoceros Bug came next out of the fishing hole (into the hut)! I used the Clone Stamp Tool to erase his shadow and took the Wand tool to select him, filled him with blue color using the Paint bucket. Then I resized him to 1 inch width and dragged him over the fishing hole, where he is still pretty shocked and is trying to hide!

I did not like little Kermit anymore next to Dolly so I am hiding him with clicking the icon in the Layers Palette.
I used the Lasso Tool to select a green area in the parakeet’s tail and with copy merged and paste I cleaned up his tail feathers which still showed some grey areas. I used the same tools to erase the front talon and I covered the missing one with more feathers to give the parakeet a more realistic stance.

The last animal is arriving in the fishing hut and everybody is waiting….

It is a relative from little Kermit, I resized him, selected him with the Wand tool and chose Feather with the value of 15 under Select and then I dragged him over into the cold water of Antarctica. Then I “beamed him up” using the Marquee tool. I drew a thin rectangle from the frog to half way up to the ceiling, with the eyedropper I clicked at a bright green color in Swatches Palette and then changed the Border to get it really feathered with clicking Select/Modify/Border and then changed the Opacity under Edit/Fill. I used the same commands for the “lower blue beam,” and just tweaked the numbers and chose a blue color. I also changed the Brightness/Contrast under Image for the “blue beam” to +39/+38.

A little clean up here and there with the Healing Brush and I am out of the fishing hut after framing my composition.
*Fishing Hole—this photo was taken in Antarctica, inside a 10’ X 16’ foot modular, scientific portable laboratory. It had a hole in the floor which, when towed into place, the ice was drilled 16’ through the Ross Ice Shelf for scientists to catch fish. I was invited to help catch fish on my Sundays off. These were some of my favorite times—I would wait for Wedell Seals to surface for air (and food)—2000 lb. and beautiful animals! Apart from these, I decided to invite some of our favorite sightings from Australia back down on the ice to keep us company. Each animal required a different set of tools to place them in their places.