This is part eight of a series that chronicles my journey through Scott Kelby’s book, Classic Photoshop Effects.

For this effect, I took an ordinary picture of a person in a winter scene from picture-newsletter.com (click image to go to source):

After touching up the colors of the photo, I added a palm tree reflection in the glasses:

I turned the photo into an advertisement for Vail, using a Photoshop default shape for the snowflake. I used an eliptical marquee tool to create the curved black area for text.  You’ll notice a slight gradient on the word “ski.”  I hoped that this would make the word a little more attractive and interesting.

This is part eight of a series that chronicles my journey through Scott Kelby’s book, Classic Photoshop Effects.

In this Photoshop creation, I created a post-it note effect to enhance a poster:

I searched Google through and through for a good house picture, and being drawn to all things warm and tropical, I fell in love with this picture of a pool.  I then thought, “what kind of company would like this photo in an ad?”  I decided to make an advertisement for a rental company.  Looking back at it now, I realize that I needed a web address and 1-800 number.  Oh well, I spent about a half-hour on it.

The logo for the rental company is one of Adobe’s built-in custom shapes.  For the post-it note, I created a yellow square, sheared it, and did the same with a black layer underneath it for a drop shadow.  The shadow then received a Gaussian blur and reduced opacity.  Bradley Hand was the font for the ink.

This is part seven of a series that chronicles my journey through Scott Kelby’s book, Classic Photoshop Effects.

In this effect, we are taught how to create a shadow to an object. The look was taken further to play with more aspects of lighting, like how would an object look with a hard light on it? How would the foundation of the object reflect that light?

Here is the original image that I started with. I took it off of wikimedia commons (click the image to go to the source):

By playing with the lighting, here is my resulting poster:

This is part six of a series that chronicles my journey through Scott Kelby’s book, Classic Photoshop Effects.

For this effect, I was supposed to practice creating a reflective surface. Apple is the king of this effect, almost to the point of being overdone. However, I didn’t want to skip a chapter for any reason whatsoever. I began by reflecting the new iPod Pico (there is no such thing), but then I figured that its size didn’t really make sense without fingers holding it. I then added fingers holding it. It then made no sense to reflect the Pico if someone was holding it, so I reflected some words instead.

The reflection trick is not really new to me, but what is involves the use of composition and typography. Also, the whole vignette effect that makes the edges black is a trick that I learned from this book.