Theme Project

As anyone with an Internet connection, newspaper, television, or radio knows, the Middle East is currently experiencing a wave of revolution that has deposed the formerly permanant "Presidents" of Tunisia and Egypt and started a civil war in Libya. Mr. Sands had the class make a picture with a theme, so I chose the situation in the Middle East. I found pictures from the Internet of protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain (where thousands of protestors are being attacked by government and Saudi forces), Iran (where protests against Ahmedinejad's rigged election in 2009 have been revived), Jordan, Algeria, and Morocco, made a collage out of them, and used some layer effects, the select tool, and Copy and Paste to make the word Revolution. Mr. Sands then had us reduce the picture to only 4 colours. With a picture as detailed as this one, it didn't work very well:

If you blow it up a bit you might be able to see the individual photos. I did this using the Threshold filtre. Mr Sands also had us simplify the picture. This was really easy to do; all I had to do was change the opacity of one of my layers:

And then we had to create one with simplified shapes, like a logo. I applied a Cutout filtre:

It worked much better than the 4-colour one.

As usual, the 6 answers:

I thought my original picture turned out quite well. The layer effects I applied to the text layer really worked in setting it apart from the background, especially combined with the 25% opacity white layer I had on top of the background. I tried a number of things to make the 4-colour one that didn't work, including using Cutout and trying a bunch of colour settings. The Cutout did work for making a logo. If I had to do this again, I would not arrange the photos in a way that would allow really obvious transitions like at the bottom of the 't', 'i', and 'o'. The hardest part was easily making the 4-colour picture. It still didn't turn out well. To make these, I discovered Layer Fill (which was set to 0% for the text layer) and Cutout.