Screen Print

Looking at the picture above, most people would think that whoever came up with an idea to replace a human head with an animal, has completely lost their mind (like I did the first time i saw what our task was for the lesson). That was until we actually did it then my mind changed towards it.

So the first step as per usual is to find the image of the album cover or artist you want to base this on and drag it into photoshop where again we had to follow some more steps in order to create what is called a screen print (not screen shot!). So i chose my favourite album cover by Keri Hilson to do this experiment with.

Such a beautiful cover

After that we had to follow a few steps to get it to look like how it looks in the first image.

So the first step was obviously drag the image to photoshop then, I had to degrade the image to grey scale. I had to desaturate it by holding down Command + Shift + U to desaturate it. Then by going to image and then adjustments then down to shadows and to highlights. By clicking show more options, I had the options that I needed in order to set it the way the man in the tutorial was showing me. Moving on, i had to change the levels of all the sliders so starting from the top, I had to change the first one to 7 the next one to 50 then 30, 11, 52, 30 +20 and leave the bottom 3 the way they are.

Using the burn tool, I went over some of the shadow areas to darken them a bit and went over her hair and face just to add a bit more detail to them (making sure that my exposure was set to 9). Once I thought that it looked ok, I had to create a noise filter setting it to 4.0 (making sure I had gaussian set. Heading over to filter, and down to blur, I selected Gaussian blur and set it to about 1.0. 

I had to sharpen the image so, by heading back to filter but this time to sharpen, I chose a smart sharpen and set it to 362 with a radius of 16.7 making sure that gaussian  blur is set. Then by repeating the same step, I had to go back to filter, sharpen , smart sharpen - this time reducing it to 149 and increasing the radius to about 41/42 to bolden the lines to give it a poster effect. 

Next, I had to clone the background so that i can paint over the face and replace it with the animal head. So by clicking on the clone tool, i held down alt and dragged it across a small area of the background so that i can now replace the face with it whilst i cut out the head of the animal. Then I had to click around the face until it was the same colour as the background (as you can see, I left the hair so that my leopard wouldn't be bald).

This is the image i used (simply because I adore leopards). So by dragging this into photoshop, i used the pen tool and drew around the outline of the head and then by enlarging the image i dragged the head cut out into position on the other image and that's how I created my version.

If I had another go at this, I would improve the way in which i went about creating the poster because I admit i drifted away from the tutorial and kind of got a hold of things on my own but incase i missed something out, next time I will follow the video the whole way through & hopefully add some colour to it.

This is the final outcome by the man from the tutorial.

This was actually created to advertise a gig that was happening in London (rather strange way of advertising a gig though).