This post will go through a nice little tutorial for my created EMRE 5807 assignment.

This first step in my creation process was to track down a Kim Droom image. Since I didn’t think any of these existed, I did a google search and it brought me to a class video from a Spring 2012 section taught by Jim Groom (no, the similarity in names are not a coincidence lol). Once I had this video up I wanted to freeze frame Kim to get him looking the way I wanted. Below is what my screen looked like when I did this.

So as you can see, I had Kim Droom just how I wanted him here, so my next step was to take a screenshot with the program Jimg, and save the image to my desktop. I took the screenshot by simultaneously clicking Command-Shift-1, after which I clicked on the screen to lock in the image, changed the name of the file and clicked on “Save”. At this point a box will pop up asking you where to save the file to. I chose to save it to my desktop.

My next step was to convert the image to a .jpg (or JPEG) file. I simply just clicked on the file name until I could change the text from .png to .jpg. I then imported the photo into iPhoto.

While in iPhoto I clicked on the “Edit” button at the bottom, and started playing around with some different things, such as the Sharpness, Definition, Highlights, and Exposure. There is obviously no “end all, be all” way to manipulate an image, it is basically depending on what you are going for. I didn’t want to make my resulting Droom image too extreme, or too boring, so I choose to make him look a little sharper, along with highlighting some of his features, like the crazy hair and awesome aviator shades.
After I did these edits, I decided to crop the image down to get it more zeroed in on Droom. You can do this by going to “Quick Fixes” and then clicking on “Crop”. From there it is pretty self-explanatory and easy to play around with. my resulting crop looked like this:

Once I had my image all cropped and how I wanted it, I imported it into GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, which can be found here. It’s not that GIMP is a terrible program to use, it just makes some tasks more complicated, and obviously it can’t do everything Photoshop can do, so there are limitations. However, for an assignment like this, it serves its purpose, so not TOO many complaints ha! Once I was in GIMP I selected the Scissors Tool, which helped me cut out Kim’s attractive figure.

Once I had Droom selected, I clicked on the image and the dashed lines flickered around his body. I then right-clicked and selected “Edit” and then “Cut”. Here is what my screen looked like afterwards:

Next I wanted to paste Kim Droom into a new layer so I could edit him more finely:

Next I used the Zoom tool, followed by the Eraser tool to get it looking more clean, which is what you see here:

So now that I had Droom looking all sexy and clean, my next step was to make a background copy of this layer with Kim Droom, so I could rename the other layer, “Layer 1″. This Layer 1 would be where I would set the background color that you see in my example. In the image below, I also show some other tools I used in the design, such as the “TextEdit” tool, and the “Mode” tool, which I used to create the cool effect that Kim Droom’s image has.

Once I had all this cool stuff sorted out on my poster, I wanted to add a detective’s badge image underlying the Kim Droom text on the left hand side. To do this I dragged the image of the badge that I got off of Google into the GIMP icon, which then opened it up in a new layer. To cut it out, I used the Scissors Select tool that I highlighted earlier in the post;

..and then followed the same “Edit, Cut–> Paste Into…” and then Selected Layer 1 to paste it into.
I also selected the “Burn” effect from the scroll down menu “Mode”..

This gave it a cool look among the other design elements of the poster. To move the badge over to underneath the selected Kim Droom Text, I simply chose the “Move” tool and centered it. This image illustrates this.

So, this was my overall process, and I hope that I laid it out clearly enough, which I feel that I did. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask! Enjoy, and happy blogging!