Contrast Poster

The following are different versions of the same contrast poster that I made for fun:

The Duck

The Grunge Duck

And...

The Dark Grunge Duck

Here is the original picture that I used:

The link to the text tutorial is as follows:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/04/50-stunning-photoshop-text-effect-tutorials/

The picture is of a female Mallard duck, a species that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. However, I wonder how many of you ever noticed the beautiful stripes of feathers on the female aspect of the species which many consider plain. That was actually my whole reason for choosing this picture (it really exhibits the feather stripes well, even if it is not a very good quality photograph).

The state I used for The Duck was high pass, while the other two (The Grunge Duck, and The Dark Grunge Duck) were both varying stages of the grunge effect.

I chose this particular text tutorial because I thought it was a nice simple effect that would add a little contrast to the soft edges of the duck. Some troubles I encountered were when I was trying to sharpen the duck image. For some reason it didn't really want to cooperate, and I kept making the wrong colors stand out too much. In the end I figured out it was because I was using Overlay, when Soft Light would have worked better. Also, I had some difficulty with color blending, as many of the colors I chose were off by just a little bit. Finally, I just added a bit more white or black and the problem resolved itself.