I’m not certain what the difference is between these two tubers, but I just wanted to make sure I had all my bases covered. I prefer to say sweet potato though (my Rhode Island accent makes yam painful to say.)

This assignment is just as ridiculous, if not more, than the last two. However, unlike the cats, I happen to love sweet potatoes. Its odd, but I can’t get enough sweet potato! When I was home for winter break I ate, on average, one a day. Since being back at school my sweet potato intake has greatly diminished (to zero). However, old habits die hard; the other day while at the grocery store (my favorite place), I bought a couple sweet potatoes.

So when I saw this assignment, naturally I had to do it. I’m hoping it will have some healing qualities and help me get over my sweet potato addiction.

I decided to combine two of my loves by making a James Bond sweet potato poster. I really really enjoy James Bond. I know the movies are silly and not realistic and completely outlandish and sexist and out dated. But, I love them. Last summer I read the first eight of Ian Flemming’s Bond novels. (They read super fast!) They were just so entertaining I couldn’t stop! The movies I am not very passionate about though. They take the fantasy of the books to a level of silliness. But…. I still watched them to accompany the books. For this assignment I chose this Sean Connery Bond poster.

Then I snatched a sweet potato from fridge and took my very own picture of it (because no one has ever posted a sweet potato picture online that was quite up to my standards?).

Then I used “Aviary” to meld the two into one. This is what I came up with.

It’s not perfect, but I spent a lot of time fiddling with the tools and I learned a lot about how Aviary works. Also, I like the final outcome.

This was ANOTHER 2-star assignment! (I don’t know why I’m falling so heavily for the 2-stars, but I’m really diggin’ them!)

I thought I would make a little tutorial to follow this. Now, let it be known that I’m no photo editing professional (as demonstrated by Sweet Potato Bond), but I’ll just give you a run down of the tools I used and what I figured out along the way.

First of all, I would suggest taking a look at these two tutorials people posted on the Aviary site. They both talk about cropping out part of an image and putting it in a new layer, so that fits the bill perfectly. The first tutorial is “Understanding Layers” and the second is “Face Swap.”

The first thing I did was open up Aviary. If you don’t have aviary just go to their site and download the program. Easy-peasy. Then open it up and select the “load image” button.

Next select the “browse” button and find an image that you already have saved to your computer which you would like to be your image background to upload. Click “upload”

Now it’s time to bring in your sweet potato image. You can either find one online (if you’re into that sorta thing) or you can take your own picture (for that more authentic looking sweet potato). So you are going to foolow much the same process as the first upload, but this time you will go to “file” and then “import file.”

Then you will click “choose file” and once again find the image that you want to use which you have saved to your computer. Then click “upload file.”

If the image that you choose is not the correct size Aviary may prompt you to change its size. This happened to me and I clicked “resize image”

Next you will use the “freeform selection tool” (aka the lasso) to crop out around the sweet potato. Just click on the icon and then click and hold your mouse, outlining the sweet potato.

When you have made it full circle around the spud, there will be this little dashed line outlining what you have traced. Right click inside the dashed line and select “cut selection.” Then go the little table-of-contents-looking layer-list-thing. And click on the icon on the bottom that says “new layer.”

While that new layer is still highlighted, go to “edit” on the main page and click “paste.” Now your potato is in the new layer. (Try to ignore how creepy Mr Bond is being right now.)

At this point to reduce future confusion, you should delete the layer that contains the outside part of the potato image that you cropped out. To do this select that layer and then click the “drop layer” button.

Working in this order, your potato should be on top of your background image. However, if it isn’t, you can simply drag the layers around in the  little table-of-contents-looking layer-list-thing to change their order.

Use the “transform tool” to move your sweet potato to its desire destination and resize it. If you let your cursor hover at the top right corner of the box surrounding the potato a symbol will appear that indicates that you can turn your potato so the angle matches whatever you are covering up better.

Once you’ve got your potato where you want it, you probably just have some final touching up to do. Mine looked very “choppy” and did quite look “authentic.” So to fix this, I used the “smudge tool.” This you can play around with (by trying something and then just clicking “undo” if it’s not what you were looking for), but I set the size to 6 and the hardness to zero. Then i just “smudged” around the outline of the potato.

Finally, I adjusted the contrast and brightness of the sweet potato. This just made it not as blaring orange and softened it up a bit to match the “vintage” vibe of the Bond poster. To do this I clicked on “image” then “brightness & contrast.”

Once again, I just played around with the settings until it looked the way I wanted it to.

When it looks the way you want it to just click “save” and name your project. Congrats!! You just sweet potatoed a movie!

To save your picture to your computer, just go to your main page on Aviary and click on the image. Then right click the image and click “save image as…” Then you can name it what you’d like and save it to the folder of your choice.

Done!! Good luck! (Just jet me know if you find anything I’m missing or if something doesn’t make sense, I’ll do my best to fit it up.)