Oooo, Lookie, A Tutorial!

When I look into your eyes...

I really like the effect on this picture. I love mistake pictures like this- you are looking at the right side of the picture, the left was booooring, so I cropped it out. I'm serious- he was cut in half in this picture, and I don't normally do that (on purpose, anyway).

What I did with this picture, after I placed it on my layout and cropped it, was duplicate the layer three times. I hid the top two layers, and changed the bottom layer to black and white using my favorite method (Image>Adjustments>Gradient Map), and then I adjusted the levels so that the light parts were white and the dark parts were black, but not so light/dark that there wasn't any detail left.

Next, I un-hid the middle layer. I went to Filter>Guassian Blur, and blurred it so that the details were hard to see. Then I lowered the opacity to 20%. Then I CTRL+ click the bottom layer, inverted the selection, and cut the extra stuff out.

Finally, I un-hid the last layer, and then zoomed in on his eye. Using the lasso selection tool, I traced the iris of his eye, inverted the selection (Select>Inverse) and cut the extra out.

The faded, dreamy look of the rest of the photo causes his eye to just pop out at you. Since this layout is about what I see when I look into his eyes, I wanted the focus to be his eye- and not the bright red shirt that he had on, or the van in the background.

I created this layout for practice with negative space (a neat concept that I've never really felt all that comfortable with) for the design class at P4D. As for the meaning behind the layout, I'm not talking about reflections- I'm talking about how he's so much like me. Sometimes, journaling can distort that magic of a layout. When I look at him, I see me at five. A little quiet around other people, chatty and talkative around people I know, completely and totally accident prone and one huge dirt magnet (Twenty-two years later, and I'm still accident prone and a walking dirt magnet).