Self Portraits with Text

Purpose:

• To learn how to put text with your self portrait to communicate something positive about “you”..interests, passions, etc.

• To think differently and creatively about your photographs;

• To become familiar with basic photoshop tools.

The first step to making these was to take the self-portraits. The first one was taken the day the project was introduced. We were partnered up and went outside to take pictures in the snow. I decided to water a tree with the prop watering can because it was interesting and reflected an aspect of myself, which is that I enjoy plants and gardening. Once I had that, I went to a website to download an interesting font that I chose because I thought it was unique and fun. I found my quote related to gardens so that there would cohesion with the product. I took the pink from the flower and layered it over the greyish color of the school so the text would stand out. The flower one was a lot simpler than the one of me sitting on the bench because it didn't require masking, and because I chose a simple wave as a layer style for the text. 

My process for the second picture was a little different because instead of being shot outside and using that background, it was taken with studio lighting inside. I chose to be laughing in the picture because humor and laughter are really important to me and are a big part of my personality. Once I had the self-portrait in front of the white backdrop, I put it into photoshop and selected myself using the object select tool. I created a quick mask from there, then used a paintbrush with black and white that added and subtracted to the mask so I could get it to be exact. When the mask looked good, I copy pasted the selection with me onto the larger background with the bench. Since the original picture was taken with me sitting on a stool, I had to be creative with positioning and cropping the bench. Once I was happy with the scaling of myself on the background, I adjusted the brightness of the layer with the self-portrait so it would better match the background. After that, I chose my quote which matched my expression, and selected a fun and retro font. I chose to curve the text so that it would mimic a smile. The part that reads: "A smile is a curve" is purposely kept more curved than the other part of the quote which then is still curved but is flatter. This is very slight but was intentional because it reflects the content of the quote.