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Final Narrative Graphic Collage

Have you ever been so busy that you just forget to eat?

Sometimes this happens to me. I get so involved in work or a project that I’m working on that I end up skipping meals.  When my brain finally realizes that my body needs some food I head to the closest fast food available, grab a quick meal, and get right back to work.

For many people this kind of scenario can happen almost everyday and let’s be honest that is no way to treat your body.

Giving your body healthy food and providing it with the nutrients that it needs can be time consuming.  It takes effort and that’s why many people don’t do it.

One of the best ways to get a good amount of the nutrients that your body needs is by juicing. It’s quick and easy and juice if chalk full of good things for your body. Even if you don’t have time to juice yourself it’s easy to stop by a local juice bar or smoothie shop and grab something on the go.

I have created a collage to show an example of this concept. It would take a good amount of time and determination for me to each five apples throughout the day and maybe three or four salads full of greens and veggies. But if I drink a juice containing a lot of these nutritious foods it only take five minutes out of my day.

This is my draft collage.

I used three images from freeimages.com

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/apple-table-1329268

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/glass-of-orange-juice-1-1525867

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/photos-1194675

To read about the specific techniques I used on this draft please refer to my previous post explaining the process.

I received some really great feedback from my classmates and I decided that word “drank” was awkward and that having two different colors of text was not the best in this situation. So I changed the wording of the first question. I then added a gray box to the bottom of the page so that I could use white text without it blending in.

Also everyone noticed the big black spots on the green background. Originally when I first published my draft I just though this was part of the background graphic and was considering finding a new background.  Then I started moving the layers around I discovered that the weird black marks weren’t on the background.  It was easy enough to isolate the culprit layer and erase the marks.

The most challenging part of the collage was eliminating the white box from around the glass and blending the edges of the glass into the rest of the collage.  For this I used different variations of the erase and the blur tool and got it to look much better in my final.

I also eliminated some of the words in the last sentence because it felt to wordy. For the last steps I cropped the edges and moved the glass around to be more prominent in front of the table.  I also eliminated so of the table and apples and cleaned up some random stray mark throughout the collage.

Here is my final collage.

 

Have you drank your greens today?

The goal of this collage is to share the message of how drinking fresh juice is conveniently healthy.  One of the main reasons many people struggle to eat healthy is because it is not convenient. It takes effort and time.  Juice is part of that solution because a lot of nutrients can be packed into one juice and it doesn’t a whole lot of time to drink it. This collage shows that in the few minutes it takes to drink and 8 ounce glass of juice you will get the same nutrients as eating 5 apples.

I have very limited experience with photoshop so creating this collage was my first real crack at using these tools.

I used three images from freeimages.com

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/apple-table-1329268

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/glass-of-orange-juice-1-1525867

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/photos-1194675

Techniques for each image.

1. For the table image with the apples I erased the background using the eraser tool. I also used the dodge tool around the edges.
2. I added the green image as a background and then used the magnetic lasso tool to trim around the edges of the table. After the section I wanted to erase was selected, I inverted the selection and used the erase tool to eliminate the original background and allow the green background to show.
3. The glass of orange juice was quite the challenge because it was surrounded by a white box. To get rid of the white box I used the erase tool. I also used the dodge tool and blur tool to soften the edges. I played with the tools from the separating background tutorial but in the end decided against using them because I did not want to make the image black and white. I will need to study up on more effective ways to use those tools.
4. To change the glass of orange juice to look like apple juice, I selected one of the apples and then selected the juice in the glass and used the “match color” effect to change the colors. I expected a brighter green but I am happy with the way it turned out.
5. When all of this was done I added the two text box layers and sized the fonts.

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