Welcome Dog Pawrents of the Bay! This past week has been crazz, Mocha and I haven’t been up to much thanks to those rare days where Bay Area weather is just blah. And I did mean “blah”. It’s not terrible – not too cold, rainy or cloudy, simply grey and chilly. 

The good news is that I (Karla) have been Photoshopping, designing a photo for the homepage of this blog. I want this picture to see the first thing people notice when they visit the site. I want to make clear what this blog is about: dogs and the SF Bay Area.

Anyway…In the process of choosing a picture for the homepage of this blog, I had two very different ideas in mind. You can quickly scroll and see that no, I did not photoshop Mocha on the moon (yet). However, if you are interested in learning more about the process I followed, keep on reading! 

Photo # 1: The Polaroid

This was the first picture I worked on. My attempt, although I need to work on it more, was to create a picture that looked like a Polaroid. To me, polaroid pictures are a synonym of fun family times because even though I was born in 1990, my dad traveled with a Polaroid camera well into 1998. 

This image is composed of these 4 different images. You can see how the pictures looked before photoshop magic. 

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When I designed this polaroid image of a dog-family friendly destination, I knew the Golden Gate Bridge had to be a focal point of the image. It’s very important that I mention that this beautiful photo of our beloved bridge, fog-free, was not taken by my camera. I downloaded the picture, called Golden Gate Bridge during blue hour by Frank Schulenburg from Wikimedia Commons. 

The rest of the images are my own work, featuring Mocha and two of the best dog spots in the area. The locations are stops along the Pacific Coast Highway, all within a 1-hour drive from San Francisco proper. 

Working from the bottom, this image consisted of at least 6 layers: 

Layer 0 – the bridge. To the image, I applied some layer effects, such as Bevel & Emboss and Drop Shadow. 

Layer 1 – Mocha. I created a “layer via copy” by cutting out Mocha from a picture I took in the California Sierra on a snowy day of 2019. 

Layer 2- On top of the Golden Gate Bridge and Mocha, I applied a layer mask to add a posterize effect. I kept the distortion of the images to a minimum so it was clearly visible.

Layers 3 and 4 – These were layers via copy from pictures in some of the area’s favorite dog-friendly beaches. Originally, I had posterized the layers too but decided against it to keep some contrast.

Layers 5 and 6 – The final elements of the image are the Paw Print that I used as a frame and the text. I tried to apply the Gestalt Theory by using the paw to combine elements in an interesting yet harmonic way. 

Photo # 2: Welcome, or in dog speak: Woofcome! 

This image was simply fun to create! I was inspired by those movie posters where the focal point is the protagonist’s face but there are other images inside. It took me hours and at least 4 tutorials to get it done, but I’m quite happy with the result. 

The image is actually comprised of 5 different pictures, all of which are my own work except for the picture you can appreciate on the left side, the San Francisco Skyline at night. Here are the originals:

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The San Francisco Skyline at night was another image I downloaded from Wikimedia Commons and is by user Cgbriggs19. Moving clockwise, you can see “El Capitan”, which can be found in Yosemite National Park, our favorite day trip out of the Bay Area. The next image is, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. Below is a picture I took of the pacific ocean from Land’s End, our favorite hiking trail in San Francisco. Of course, Mocha’s face is the first thing you see. My decision to use Mocha as the “boundary” for all the pictures was in order to achieve unity in the final result. 

If I could put a title to the process for this image I would call it “mask & clipping masks.” Originally, the image was built like this: 

Layer 0: A Mask of Mocha’s face, which I created by doing a layer via copy. 

Layers 1 – 4: These layers are the pictures. I made a clipping mask for each picture and worked on each image individually. Tweaking the opacity of the images while I was moving them around helped a lot to get the final look I wanted. 

Layer 5: This is a copy of Layer 0 that I put on top of all the images and I got the see-through look by switching the blending mode to “screen”.

I finished by adding text, adjusting the color of all the layers and background, which I am not 100% sold on.

Wags and Kisses,

Mocha’s Mom.