Daniel Musgrave
1/29/2006
CSE 455
Project 1
Index
Step 1: Creating the sides of the box
Step 4: Adding Earth inside the box
I
wanted to create some sort of surreal effect through mixtures of obviously
impossible images. I’ve seen clever
compositing before produce very realistic looking results, and hoped to
recreate that myself. I came up with the
idea of the Earth in a box relatively early.
However, that wasn’t interesting enough in itself, so I decided to
package it as if it were some sort of toy or game. After I did that, it became easy to add
little humorous bits such as “Made in
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The Box I spent a great deal of
time trying to find an image of a box that was high enough quality on the
Internet. I was unsuccessful (after
all, who wants to take a high quality picture of a cardboard box and upload it
onto a website?), so I ended up having to upscale the image and compensate
for the lack of detail myself. (pic_extrastrongbox.jpg, 399x267) |
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The Earth I had little trouble
finding all kinds of high quality pictures of the earth on the web. I ended up getting three separate views,
two for the two visible sides of the box, and one for inside the box
itself. I made sure the two box images
had similar color content and composition while the third was slightly
different; this would provide a bit of contrast between the three. (bluemarblewest.jpg, 800x800) |
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(bluemarbleeast.jpg, 800x800) |
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(earthafr.jpg, 640x646) |
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The
Limited Edition Sticker I
wanted to make this particular boxed planet special; hence, the “Limited Edition”
sticker on the front. I knew I wanted
to make it a nice, jagged star pattern.
I ended up creating an autoshape in Microsoft Word, taking a
screenshot, and masking the star out of the cropped image. (star.jpg, 640x428) |
The
first parts of the image I created were the sides of the box. I created the mask for the planet and added
the planet and the newly-created mask to a new Photoshop image.
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bluemarblewest.jpg |
bluemarblewest_mask.jpg |
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Then I added the
“BUILD-YOUR-OWN” and “Planet” text using Photoshop’s built in text tools.
After that, I created the
logo mask and added the logo. After
scaling and rotating it into the correct location, I added the “Limited EARTH
Edition” text.
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star.jpg |
star_mask.jpg |
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This looked a little boring
to me, so I played a bit with the text settings and came up with this:
Finally, I added a little
flavor text to the bottom to spice things up.
The steps to create the second
side were very similar.
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Side 1 (front) |
Side 2 (side) |
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As
I mentioned above, the image of the box I had found was very small. At 399x267 pixels, the large text on my box would
barely be legible, and the small text would be impossible to read. Thus, I knew I had to scale up the size. I ended up scaling the image up to 1200x803,
which made things a lot easier to see.
However, the box wasn’t very pretty; the image, already a fairly low
quality jpeg to begin with, needed a lot of touching up. I ended up adding some noise, smoothing,
sharpening, and playing around with the healing brush and clone stamp in an
attempt to improve the quality. It ended
up working reasonably well, but I would have much preferred to have a better
quality image to work with.
At
this stage, I applied the two box sides to the box itself. In order to get them to appear to be on the
surface of the box itself, first I used the Deform transform in Photoshop to
conform them to their respective sides of the box. At this point, the two box sides appeared to
overlap their respective flaps, so I created a layer mask for each and applied
it over the side texture to correctly occlude the appropriate portions of the
texture. I also did a color replacement
on the outside of the box to change its color from the original brown to a
light blue. Finally, I added a shadow
layer to each side so that the texture would match the original shadow on the
box itself.
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The box before masking
the side images |
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box_side_1_mask.jpg |
box_side_2_mask.jpg |
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The box after above masks
are applied |
The box after shadow
textures are applied |
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Step 4: Adding
Earth inside the box
The
next step was to put Earth inside the box itself. This didn’t involve anything more complicated
than I already had done, so it went by quickly.
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earthafr.jpg |
earthafr_mask.jpg |
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The box after adding the Earth
inside |
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At
this point, all that was left to do was a few minor features. First, I added the caption text, “One of the
less well-known theories on the formation of the universe…” using Photoshop’s text
utilities. Then I added the shadow of
the box by dragging an approximation of the shadow with the lasso tool,
feathering by 15 pixels, and filling with 25% black. Finally, I added the watermark in the lower
right hand corner.
The Final
Image
