Week Six - Photo Collage

Wow, it's so hard to believe this is the last week of Launchpad A.
The last few weeks have flown by and with the help of Janee I am now a lot more confident using Photoshop. While I know there is still tons to learn I have progressed from knowing nothing about the program to being confidant enough to put together the collage you see on this page.

After creating a pink background I decided to base my collage on my daughter (Amanda) because the girl is just nuts about anything pink!!!!!!!Trawling through hundreds of photos, digital and 35mm prints to gather the pictures I needed was lots of fun.

Every picture was cropped, resized, moved and had an Inner Glow added to create the white boarder. The blue flowers were taken from the picture below which I had in my digital library (what can I say, I photograph flowers for fun).

I created 2 files from the photo, the bigger posy and the small single flower and then used the Dry Brush filter to get the subtle effect of painted flowers.

Because today is Mother's Day in Ireland we printed out the picture and gave it to Amanda's Grandmother!!!

Janee, thanks for everything! I admire your inner strength and your teaching skills. I hope we both have the patience to get me through Launchpad B and C.

Edit: 25th March 2007

Thanks to John's tip I have brightened the middle picture, I hadn't noticed it was so dark. The updated pic is below.

Week 5-Creating A Business Card

Week 5 at myjanee is all about using graphics and type to create a business card or letter head.

The first step in creating my business card is to use one of the graphics I created last week (using filters) for my background. To do this I have gone into image size and changed all settings to match my card size. Resample Image was also chosen to change the pixel dimensions, after the first attempt was too big to place on the card.

Using the move tool, the picture was dragged onto the card background layer. Opacity was lowered to 60% in the layers palatte. Later this would be lowered to 50% because it overpowered a later quilt graphic which was added.

Each section (sentence) of text was added on a new text layer. I had some trouble using the Align and Distribute features so I'm going to give this another try on a second card.

This is my first card, please note all information is fake :-).

My second card (also based on false information) is below, this time I created the background graphic using the custom shape tool. Yet again the "snap to" function did not appear to work, in the end I opted to place the text in different positions and not in a neat row as planned.

This week has been lots of fun and I can't believe tomorrow sees the arrival of the last lesson in Launchpad A :-(

Lunar Eclipse

I had great fun tonight taking photos of the Lunar Eclipse.
The last total eclipse was in 2004 and was mostly obliterated by cloud, tonight though we were blessed with a mostly clear sky.

Here are the links to my best photos (I took almost 50 over the space of an hour and a half).

Lunar Eclipse-Photo 1

Lunar Eclipse-Photo 2

Lunar Eclipse-Photo 3

Lunar Eclipse-Photo 4

Lunar Eclipse-Photo 5

The photos were taken in the following time order:
22.02, 22.22, 22.38, 22.46 and 22.50. After that the moon was still visible to the naked eye but not to the camera.

The camera I used is a Cannon PowerShot G5.