Light at the end of the tunnel

Not all bad...... yet

After facing possibility of potentially failing the degree in the first year, all does not seem too bad today. After a brief and very helpful chat with my lecturer, I was informed that I am on track with this assignment, just need to keep pushing, which I have to do anyway.

What has happened so far

So after a brief pep talk, it was time to get on with completing the assignment. So the first thing I wanted to do was give the impression that there was aliens walking in the backdrop of the city. So the first thing I did was copy the background for the front of the case and place it on a new layer. From here, I used the quick selection tool to remove a lot of the tall buildings and keep some of the smaller ones, which left me with this:

Remainder of the copy of the background

So from here I copied the aliens, moved the background aliens in between the complete background and the edited one, re-sized the aliens (Thanks for me showing me how to do that Jamie) and slightly tucked them under the layer as seen below:

Silhouettes of aliens ion the background

The reason they are silhouettes are because I already changed the opacity, but as soon as I add the original background again, this is the result:

Aliens walking in the background

I also changed the Hue/Saturation as well as the opacity as the background image is very green looking and the alien tripods were just black sketches, so changing the settings made it look like the aliens were part of the original picture.

Adding a foreground

The next plan was to add a foreground to give the picture some sort of definition. So I already had a picture chosen and proceeded to use the quick selection tool and deleted half of the image so I could still see the background. But the problem was that the foreground did not match the background above. So I decided to go through the colour effects until I found one suitable and decided to darken the picture. Below is the before and after:

Before picture effect

After picture effect

So I had the background and the foreground all done, the plane was to add some extra features to make sure that anyone viewing the cover, know that the movie was about an alien invasion. So the next plan was to add a large alien at the front of the picture. I found a suitable alien but the problem was that the alien stood out too much.

Good image but too bright

So the main step for this task was to make the alien a similar colour to the background so it didn't stand out too much. But another feature I wanted to do was to make it appear as if the alien tripod was walking from the background to the foreground. I did attempt to use puppet warp but I couldn't get the points to work. So the next best option was to select the image, tick the box for "show transform controls" and select the perspective warp from the options bar. All I had to do was change the points and make it appear the tripod alien climbing into the front. This was result:

The angle works fine, now just the appearance

So the position is fine, it is just the colour and contrast that needed changing. So I started to tweak the brightness and contrast on the adjustments tab until I got something that looked a little better:

Changed the levels to suit my needs

From the shot above there doesn't seem to be much change and looking at the picture in Photoshop there wasn't that much of a change either. A technique I learnt while very quickly reading the classroom book was to duplicate a layer and change the settings on the new layer. Adding the new layer looked great but I still wasn't happy with the appearance. So I changed the settings of the Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation levels and changed the appearance from normal to colour burn to the image changed from this:

Additional layer before changes

And changed it to this:

Additional layer with the levels changed

I stuck with this look because the colour burn levels gave the alien tripod a slight blue tinge with a metallic finish. Then to make sure the image fit with the background, I decreased the brightness and contrast levels and modified the hue saturation levels slightly.

So this post is getting quite long but more has been done so check the next post for what else I did to the front.