Managing Foggy Stuff

Smoke and Cloud exercise
This piece of work is in-class practice of Photoshop.
The main goal was to obtain smoky image and select it properly to make use of it.

First, you have to find good pictures of smoke. Black or white background is preferable for operational convenience.
Also, You can change the color of smoke, if you want.

Second, you need to select smoke. To do this, Adjust black and white level. Then, convert the smoke image into CMYK mode.
In CMYK mode, you can select black from Channel pane by Ctri + clicking black channel’s sumnail.. If you don’t like the selection, undo until your level adjustment.

Finally, if you like your black color selection, delete it. Then, invert selection to the smoke, so that you can copy it and use it anywhere you want.

You can also apply this method to fog and cloud as well. Enjoy your designing!

Floral Pattern – Balance Method

The picture on the left was a supposed invitation letter, wherein floral pattern was applied as downloaded brush practice.
Several mistakes was pointed out by the instructor.
First, Arial font is not good enought for highely decorated design.
Also, title font is handwritten font. All letters are supposed to be connected.

Socond, foggy blur behind the text is not necessary. This is not helping the legibility at all.

Finally, Top half and bottom half are unbalanced. Bottom is finely decorative but top half is whitish and too light, comparing to the bottom. In short, top is too light and bottom is too heavy.

The picture on the right was after editing all recommendations.
Right. This looks much balanced.

Contrast Method

The lesson I leant this time was contrast method for a design.
Look at the left image that looks like a logo.
First off, dreamy string and decorative shiny stars were illuminative.
Then, type and star shapes were put on top of another.
Blur effect is applied and Gaussian blur is also applied to a text.
All fore-ground components were in white color.
So, over all impression is fuzzy and fluffy with pastel colors.
Now, solid color is applied to a tag line.
This makes a contrast between main content and tag.

Floral Pattern

I used two colors. One to three colors management are rather easier than more colors.
So, I stick to safe design for now.
What’s good about this design is that I used floral texture.
I downloaded these at http://www.brusheezy.com.  This site is really useful.
Also, I isolated I from invitation, so that I can position it wherever I want.
For contents message, I may need adjustment for color
because letters are dissolving into back ground color and illegible. I bet I need more dense color.

Analysis for glow effect

In the picture on your right side, there’s two buttons.For this time, I did not use layer attributes. So, everything was done by Gaussian Blur and Gradient.
When background is black, you can see the effect on outer glow done by blurring.
As you may have notice, of left side of the left button, outer glow really stands out.
But this should not be the way because intense glow distract the audience.

Compare to the left half with more thin color.


Right button has inner glow. This looks nice, as long as it has some stroke color,
so that the edge of button can be distinct.