Ps: Magazine Cover

I am familiar with ranchers and cowboys. My husband and I visit our friend's ranch in Nevada sometimes. He took this photo himself posing with new hat in a ranch pickup.

Ps: Using Text as a Clipping Mask & Pop Dots

It shows... 3 hours after Thanksgiving feast of my family.

Original Photo

I found this cat figurine in front of an electronics store in Japan. It was so cute so I took this shot.

Ps: Depth of Field

This photo was taken when I visited Ishikawa-prefecture, Japan in 2008.  The town faces a Northern sea and many buildings are still preserved in traditional style.

Ps: Masks

I did the mask work 4 times to get the best result on her hair, then applied warp effect on the bottom of the background to make it look like liquid.

Ps: Plugins

In this image, I used "fusion pop art" and "sphere warp" filters. The image was from a photo I took at the UCSC botanical garden.  The flower is Protea, a native in South Africa.

Ps: Surreal

My neighbor Jeanne traveled to England and sent me a photo of her and her relatives sitting in a London pub.  I replaced her relatives' heads with her pets. I hid beer mugs behind the fruit bowl, the wine bottle and the wine glasses. I had so much fun on this project.

Ps: Collage

Soseki Natsume is Japanese novelist and essayist, and a master of psychological fiction. He was regarded as one of the great literary figures of the Meiji and Taisho periods in Japan. Soseki is still widely read and his major works of fiction have been translated into English. Soseki lived in the midst of rapidly accelerating Westernization. Traditional Japanese value and way of life were disappearing, especially in big cities such as Tokyo.  Major themes in Soseki's works includes problems of modernization of Japan which lead to conflicts of all sorts: loyalty and group mentality versus freedom and individuality, personal isolation and estrangement, duty and desire. My challenge was to compile images of conflicts (people, histories, locations, etc.), and identify who the writer, Soseki, was.

I had an idea of half western and half Japan scenery as a background.  But I was not sure how to put the foreground images together.  When I placed the scanned cat image to this page, it appeared so large because of the original image size.  It was totally not expected - I was actually thinking a small cat image on the side or so.  But this surprise perfected the layout.

Ps: Typography

My friend, Jack Madson is an abstract painting artist.  He recently published his memoir "Magnets, Rainbows and Funny Fish",  a story of a boy found a way of learning things, looking at life.  It was funny, touching and reminiscing ... a great book!

I wanted to make the typography to be clear and readable.  I placed an oval shape with gold satin effect under the rainbow as the text area, then used bevel and emboss on the typography to show level.

Ps: Colors

When I visited Anza Borrego State Park in 2006, I shot the background photo.  I shot the second image in downtown Santa Cruz.  It is the reflection of a store window.  I chose a theme of complimentary color scheme.  The desert color of the earth and sky are natural opposite colors in the color wheel.  To increase contrast I darkened the earth and sky colors using the curve function. For the middle image, I placed the city scene in front of the hiker like a mirage, by adjusting selection edge with increased radius and feather effect. I made it transparent with opacity control. There are two contrasts here: sky and earth, and desert and city. The hiker is my friend, Fleur.

Ps: Duotone

I shot the background photo at Anza Borrego State Park, CA.  This particular location is called Wind Caves.  I thought this whimsical location was perfect for this dodo bird.