Exhibit One
Powerful Image
Design: The way I envisioned this image in my mind began with the saying, "the eyes are the window into a persons soul." I took soul and replaced it with a galaxy.
Contrast: I've used a white text that cuts through the grey space behind it and of course the vibrant galaxy present in the eye of the woman.
Repetition: I utilized only one font here because after I worked the image itself to where I wanted the attitude of the piece seemed to dictate simplicity in the font.
Alignment: I've aligned the text to be approximately 100 pixels inward from the left and bottom of the photo. Utilizing a roman hanging punctuation style, I've allowed the quotation marks and the hyphen to lay outside my guideline. Since my font is very monospace, these two hanging features remain well aligned even outside of the guide.
Proximity: The paraphrased quote lies directly above the name of the speaker, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This ensures that the viewer understand the connection of words to speaker.
Photoshop Techniques
I began with a 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels wide empty background. After searching through a few stock image resources I found the photograph of the woman; after downloading it I opened it inside of Photoshop and Camera Raw. I used noise correction from Camera Raw before cropping the photo down to the 1920 x 1080 pixel size I needed in photoshop. With the photo now in my project I masked out the area of her cornea and erased it, then I applied a black and white adjustment layer and once again masked out the area of the cornea so that it would be unaffected by the adjustment layer. I then opened the nebula-like image and placed it in a layer below the image of the woman, once there I downscaled and rotated it until it filled out the space of her cornea the way I wanted. After that, I went back to the layer with the woman's photo and used the brush with around a 20% opacity to fade the two images in the eye more softly together. Lastly, I laid out my ruler guides to the approximate 100 pixels and added my quote following each comma with a new line to help reinforce the pause in reading and increase the significance of each set of words.
Revision
Following the original version, I took the suggestions and decided to increase the zoom on the image and alter the black / white adjustment layer to emphasize the blacks which made the eye stand out much more against the rest of the image.