Dhante's Website

       I thought to myself, "Man. I really what to create a composite image of a beach, but I also want to do something about space." So, i made myself a compromise and created a beach with the cosmos hovering above it. So, first, I had to find a few images; a planet of sorts, a beach, some mountains, and a moon. I also had to find clouds and some crazy space phenomena which was the meteor shower seen above on the left side of the image. At first they looked completely strange sitting next to each other especially when it came to their own individual color scheme, so I messed with many images to no avail. So the I decided to use a tool that wasn't required for this assignment in order to change the colors of the images with complete control. The blending options did help afterwards, but wasn't really meshing well before hand. The tool was not a tool, but instead just adding layer styles to some images ("fx" as it's labeled next to the layer mask icon). These enhancements really helped blend all of the images together and allowed me to change the opacity of objects without altering the colors. The only issue that was left unresolved were the clouds in front of the cluster of planets. They didn't really look alright in front of such a bright image. However, I attempted to give them an inner glow to give them a more foggy look to them. They look fine to me now, but to be honest, they still look weird for some reason. The coolest things that I figured out was how to put a reflection on the water and to darken only the water. The reflection was straight forward; copy image, flip image, and change its opacity. The darkened water on the other hand was where I was stumped. At this point, the images failed to blend together, the clouds looked stupid, and the water was to bright in correlation to the sky. I was going to start over, but in refusal to start over (and the lack of time) I had a brief memory of something important: I was messing around in Photoshop during the beginning of the semester during instruction of the paint tool and I pressed the mentioned "fx" icon. The squiggly drawing I had on screen started glowing for some reason. Afterwards, I began to mess around with the different settings to see what would happen and came up with many strange results. One of those strange results was the important memory which in result was the Gradient overlay. This allowed me to change the water's color scheme without using a mask or a different layer or anything complicated like that. In result of this rambling, I had a really tough time with thing assignment, but soon turned extremely easy after the discovery of the layer styles.