Fine Art Template and Typography

I have a confession to make. I am in love with Adobe Lightroom.  I don’t care anymore if the world knows it.

That said, I have had a lot of fun learning some tricks in Photoshop.  There is no doubt that Photoshop is a more powerful program, and I am starting to get to a point where I can appreciate and use some of that power to my advantage.  This week’s gem was creating a template for fine art.  This involves creating a layer with windows cut out of it that an image can hide behind, creating a unique feel.  I tried to do something like this in Comm. 130, and I can tell you it took years longer and didn’t look quite as good.  After the windows were in place, I scanned in a copy of my signature, opaqued it, and placed it over the business name to create a showcase template for both the business and the photo.  Here is how it turned out:

This week I was also able to explore the world of combining typography with photography.  I actually had a lot of fun mixing my “ography’s”, although the assignment did leave the loophole of not specifying what our text should be about.  I figured I could either find some cheesy quote to play off the beauty of nature in my photos, or I could sarcastically mock such things.  Guess which one I chose.  I used Libre Baskerville, an oldstyle serif, as my title font. I also used Walkway Semibold, a modern/san serif, as my body copy.  I’m now in love with that latter one, thanks to this assignment.

I actually found this beaver dam at Eagle Park here in Rexburg.  I pulled out my 70-300 mm. Tamron lens and got some long range shots right around 90 mm.  I used my recurring themes of nature and sarcasm to play off the fact that this is indeed a dam, and it involves nature.

I got this shot off a pathway at Eagle Park.  This is deadly nightshade, which (like it says above) can stop your heart and cause death.  They actually use extract from this stuff to control your heart rate in the hospital.  It’s crazy.  Again, recurring nature and sarcasm theme.  I also bumped a little bit of a vignette to create more of a focal point, and I put an opaque box behind the text.  I used the eyedropper tool to pull an exact shade from one of the leaves so it would match well.

One more little secret.  I used the content aware tool in Photoshop that we learned last week to remove a vertical branch that went right behind the text.  It was distracting, so I Shift F5’d it out of there and used the spot healer and clone stamp to clean up the leftovers.  It was amazing, I already love that trick.

In my life, like many of you, I have seen endless pictures of paths and life lesson quotes.  I figured this would be a fun time to stick to my themes and mock those a little bit.  I feel like the black and white was a good choice here, as it adds drama and–in this case–even more sarcasm.  I took some extra time to hand curve my text around the actual path.  I don’t know if you noticed, but it also gradually gets bigger, gets bold on some key words and phrases, and changes font on Robert Frost.