I decided to take another shot at the Animated Magazine Cover assignment. Former ds106 master Jim Groom did a GQ Dude cover, and I thought GQ would be tailor-made for Bond. As it turns out, it was, since I found a GQ France cover with Daniel Craig on it. The Bond GIF I picked to work with was Sean Connery, which makes for a nice mismatch.

I did this with Photoshop. I used the Select Color Range function to pick up the red, the Magic Wand to get the white background and the type on top of Craig, and the rectangular select tool to get the black type. I copied all that to a new layer, and used the Magic Wand to select the white background to delete it. That gave me a layer with just the text and logo, and no background, which I could paste on top of a GIF. I checked the size of the cover, 1346 pixels high, and resized the Bond GIF to the same size, and I added a new layer on top of the stack. The I copied my GQ cover layer and pasted it on top. There was a problem though, because the black type on the left side was over a black part of the image. So I used my trusty Control-Z to undo the paste, and went back to my GQ file, selected the black text on the left, and used Image->Adjust->Invert to make the text white. Then I pasted it back on the GIF and used the Crop tool to trim it to magazine proportions. I also added a new GQ logo since part of it was cut off.

It’s a little fuzzy, but that’s okay because the GIF is a little grainy. The logo seems a little out of place because it’s cleaner that the rest, but not too much. I think it helps that most of the GIF image is pretty static. It makes it more magazine-like.