Haunted Hammonton High School
Inspired by the season of Halloween, as well as various haunted internet tutorials, we took it upon ourselves to create a so-called "Haunted Hammonton High School." By taking ordinary images and altering them in Adobe Photoshop, I was able to achieve a spooky effect on the school Psychology teacher, Mr. Barbagallo.
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In class, we learned how to create a "ghosted image" through various Photoshop techniques. I used an image of actress Jennifer Lawrence, and silhouetted it by getting rid of the white background with the magic wand tool. I began to record my actions, under the new actions set "Ghosting" and the Action "Ghosting 1 (BEFORE Brush), so that I would be able to play them on my actual file later. I first copied the background layer, and called the layer "desaturated." I desaturated that layer, and then copied it to a third layer, calling that one "motion blur." In that new third layer, I applied the motion blue filter at zero degrees and distance of about 95 pixels. I added a layer mask to my "motion blur" layer, and stopped my actions, since the next step would be specific to each image. In the layer mask, I painted black with an opacity of 10% to reveal some of the face. I created a new Action, called "Ghosting 2 (AFTER Brush) and began recording again. I merged all the layers into a new layer, and applied a diffuse glow filter. Finally, I added a solid fill color layer, changing the blending mode to "Color" and lowering the opacity. After stopping my actions once more, I was left with two saved actions to be played on images for my actual project.
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We also learned how to alter an image to look like a zombie in Adobe photoshop. After cutting out Mr. Barbagallo from the photograph, I practiced some of the zombie techniques on him in a separate file. I first found an image of a skull, positioned in the same way as the face of my person. In my Barbagallo file, I duplicated the background layer, desaturated the duplicate, and lowered the opacity to 70%. I next created a layer mask, and using a soft black brush at an opacity of about 60%, I painted the eyes to give them a natural red-rimmed look. I flattened the file, and the positioned the silhouetted skull in the general location it would appear over Mr. Barbagallo's face. Using a soft eraser with an opacity of around 50% to gradually erase parts of the skull, and make it appear natural. I colorized the skull layer under hue/saturation in order to make it seamless. Next, I used the Quickmask to make a selection of just the flesh on Mr. Barbagallo, and saved my selection. Using a set of downloaded scratch/vein/sore brushes, and within my loaded selection, I added various textures to his face, all in separate layers. To finish, I altered the blending modes of these layers to achieve different gory color aspects.
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In creating my own scene, I zoomed in on the library picture and played the ghosting action on it to make it seem unrealistic and spooky. I cut out the chair from the other picture, and placed it behind Barbagallo, using filters and effects to make it seem sketchy and somewhat transparent around the edges. To Mr. Barbagallo himself, I lightened his beard and enacted a Hue/Saturation adjustment on his tie. From there, I followed the steps of the zombie technique, and finished by putting a black and white gradient layer at a low opacity on top of everything else.