Hey everyone! It's time for another update, and you guessed it, this one's for another school project. For this assignment my professor tasked us with creating a heads up display in either Illustrator or Photoshop. It had to be sized according to a 16:9 aspect ratio and displayed over a photo to simulate a first person perspective. I decided to have some fun with this one so I used a picture of one of my cats.

This is Pinky, as you can probably tell she's serving a bit of attitude in this picture. Perfect for what I wanted to do. My idea was to take this sassy cat picture and turn it into a Terminator 2 homage. Seeing how the Terminator viewed things in the movies was something that stayed with me from my childhood, so thought it'd put my own spin on it for this assignment.

First I needed to change up the image a bit and make it look more digitized. After adding one orange and one blue radial gradient to a layer I switched the blending mode to hard mix and came up with this.

Looks pretty cool but I've got a long way to go. After duplicating the original image then combining a copy of the gradients I created I sandwiched those layers together. I then changed the blending mode to exclusion and this is what I got.

I'm really liking it now, it sorta has a 3D look so I decided to really push that concept later. I added another copy of the original image in hard mix mode to give it a bit more depth. After that I put another copy on top in luminosity mode, this brought back a little more detail that was previously missing. Here's what that looked like.

It's getting there, now it was time to add in some noise. I also added a blue green gradient to the top and bottom to balance out the intense red of my cat in the image. This is what I ended up with afterwords.

Almost done! At this point it just needed a little extra tweaking. I added a bit of green in the background to further contrast the red tint on my cat. I then added a color dodge layer to make her look a little less dark. That left me with this.

Now it was time for some text. The HUD in Terminator 2 didn't really look as complex as what we might be used to today, but I liked that retro look so I tried to stay true to it. After a little creative writing I came up with this.

I liked the way this looked, but I felt like it was missing something. That's when I remembered I wanted to incorporate something else to push the 3D feeling I got when I first started editing the image. I selected every bit of text I typed, then added an outer glow blending option, then separated the blending options from each set of layers. This was done in red, green, and blue to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. Once that was done I added a bit of letterboxing and then my image was complete. Here's the final result!

There you have it, the finished product. See if you can spot the not so hidden Terminator reference. I hope you enjoyed reading through this as much as I enjoyed making it. It was a lot of fun.

I just wanted to make a quick announcement at the end of this post. I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that has been stopping by and viewing my blog. It was important that I post something today because after checking my account I noticed I surpassed one thousand views! That's super incredible to me and it's extremely gratifying to see. Thanks again!

Expect another post later this month. The semester's winding down so I've still got a few projects left to complete. Till next time!