Nikki Chau » Graphic Design

Visit Pandora, Again!

Nikki Chau — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:19:22 +0000

I got some awesome feedback from my Design Instructor on my last Visit Pandora guide cover, and here’s the new and improved version.

What I did:

Drop shadows and beveled edges for framing and separating images.
Remove All CAPS or small caps … tough top read than upper and lower case.
Anti-alias the headermore
Decrease the leading between the head and sub head just a tad.
Add an Info source

Before Sunset

Nikki Chau — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:07:30 +0000

One of my favorite movies is Before Sunset. For one of the Photoshop exercises, I created an imaginary poster for this movie.

I wanted to show the two lead characters, in fact the only ones, in a silhouette-ish layer to convey the idea that they have been living in the shadow of their encounters 9 years earlier, and that they had missed an appointment with each other. There are also some emotions for them to sort through.

The movie takes place in Paris, hence the Seine river and the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to make the sky a dark blue as sunsetting sky would be, but blue for optimism, the idea of “blue sky ahead”. I wanted to make the movie title “Before Sunset” a part of the horizon, as the sun would be.

A Yoga Room to Call My Own

Nikki Chau — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:44:50 +0000

Tonight’s lecture was on using Adobe Bridge as a Digital Asset Management tool, and one exercise was on the use of shadow and lighting.

I was to transform this room into anything I wanted:

Just another empty apartment room.

I thought, hey, why not my own Yoga space? And so, making it into my dream yoga room, I did.

My dream space

I used the view of the Olympic mountains and the Puget Sound as inspiration. Actually, the wallpaper might be a little too “girly” for my taste, but it looked really cool when I “put it on”. The teardrop lamps are sorta novel, so I experimented with that.

Tricks used:

Lots of Layering and Filtering
Clipping Masks
Drop Shadow
Vanishing Point Filter
Transforming

I thought the timing of this exercise was impeccable, because over at my Yoga Blog, I just wrote about something along the same line of working with lighting and shadows. Sometimes, “she moves in mysterious ways”…

Pandora Tourism Brochure

Nikki Chau — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:30:47 +0000

What if the Department of Tourism needed a Tourist brochure? Here’s something I thought would be fun to make to play around with Filters.

A Pandora Visitors Guide Brochure Cover

Filters used:

Unsharp mask
Craquelure
Water paper
Texturizer
Posterize
Cut-out
Glowing Edge

Images aren’t mine, I just cropped and filtered them. Thank you to all the artists for putting them out there so I can crop and photoshop to my heart’s content.

What are your thoughts? Would you visit?

Relief From Photoshop Addiction, an Advertisement

Nikki Chau — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:59:02 +0000

I worked on this ad today, using basic typography tricks including Type Masking, Drop Shadowing, and Warping.

Ask your doctor today. Drugs for Facebook and Twitter forthcoming.

Photoshop for Fun and Profit

Nikki Chau — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:30:24 +0000

I’ve been playing/working with layers, and here’s a sample.

A lodge cabin before surgery

And… here’s what the post-surgery Heidi Montag version looks like:

If you can landscape in real life, there's always Photoshop

Some things I did:

Using some advanced selection methods like Color Range, Quick Mask, and Extract Filter.
Using Alpha Channel Mask for layering.
Using Transform and Opacity Levels to modify text and 3D effect.

What’s your feedback for me to improve on?

Photoshop is Ruining my Life!

Nikki Chau — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:34:55 +0000

This is what a friend of my told me when we were in college. He was in the Art School studying Visual Design, and he said that he can’t look at Maxim or any of those skin magazines the same way anymore. “All I see is Photoshop retouching!”, he’d exclaim.

And oh, yes, I do know what he means.

Here’s before

A small child with a rock, and a couple scratches

Here’s after a couple strokes of the healing brush:

Okay, now there's a face a mother could love, right?

I used a couple things to retouch the image:
Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, Dodge, Patch, and Burn tools.