it's basically witchcraft.

I'm assembling a small 8-page book of various photoshop techniques I have mastered, and I'd love to share with you what I have so far!

First off we've got the front and back cover spread.

I went through a number of different ideas before settling on this one. I had initially wanted to design the book to have a retro candy-shop feeling to it, though I had issues finding the right stock photography for the layout, and ended up ditching that idea. I'd also toyed around with a picnic theme and a scrapbook theme.

What I ended up on is a sort of old-timey photo album look. The pages pinned onto the back cover will eventually have some information about myself and this project inserted into it, and the front cover still has some editing to be done to it.
But it's pretty, and I like.

Page one is a twofer project! It's the first page of my book, as well as my new header! Multitasking for the win!

Not all of the pages in the book will have that papery manilla background, but I liked it on this one, and since it was so similar to the cover, I thought it would be a neat idea to make it seem like it was the same piece of paper, viewed from the front and the back!

Page two is very much not like the first page.

Did you know photoshop had something called the "Puppet Tool"? I didn't. It's not something I was taught, or even something I'd heard of, really. I found a lovely tutorial on how to use it and reproduced this! It was very fun, but a little fiddly to actually manipulate. I did, however, LOVE that you could arrange the points of manipulation, and the image would follow that arrangement.
ie: I sent one of the nodes on the overlapping necks to the back, and it took that section of the image and moved it behind the second neck.)
It's a little hard to explain, but I definitely recommend trying it out!

The third page I have up as of tonight is some photo manipulation.

I started out with a photo of the model holding the gun, and through about a zillion adjustments and filters and new layers, turned her into some comic art! Halftones for everyone!

I still have 5 more pages to work through, so keep your eyes open for the rest of them in the near future!
:D

Thanks for reading! And thanks to photoshoplady.com for the excellent tutorials and stock images and textures!

-JessB