Software, Design, Networking and other Mac Tips:
If you are on our mailing list, then you know how delightful our meeting notices have become. Hey - even if you aren't on our mailing list, all you have to do is checkout the front page of this website once a month! Each meeting announcement is accompanied by a wonderfully creative description and captivating graphic. We have our Secretary and Chief Comedian Rob Ellis to thank for all of this!
The “July Non-Meeting” announcement was particularly enjoyable. The picture, with the apple/mac2 image in the sand, begs the question: “How’d he do that?!” What follows is how Rob pulled it off ... in his own words.
How’d He Do That?!
Well, the original photo is from one of my image collections for graphic design, and the woman is originally drawing a heart in the sand. So after correcting the colors and brightening and cropping the image, I did some retouching to remove the heart drawing from the sand, and "cleaned up" the sand so it wouldn't have any distracting areas.
For the "MAC2" and Apple logo, I wanted it to look like the woman actually drew them, so I didn't use a font or the Apple image. Instead I drew them by hand, and made a point of leaving in the little imperfections, just like you would get if you wrote in the sand. I also intentionally drew them straight-on, with no perspective. I then did a series of shadow and highlight effects on the drawings to create the look of writing in the sand, being careful to pre-match the direction of the sunlight and shadows that are in the original photo. The sand in the original is the type that's been very packed down by the surf and sort of breaks up into clumps as you draw in it. I wanted, instead, the type of sand that is dry, soft, and very fine, the kind of dry sand that oozes between your toes as you walk in it, so I did the shadows and highlights to imitate that. When you write or draw in sand, some sand is displaced, usually to the sides, so I did four individual areas of shadow effects and 
highlight effects: the inner writing area shadows and highlights (the grooves where the sand is pushed in), and for the displaced sand, the outer shadows and highlights. You never see my actual drawings of "MAC2" and the Apple logo because I turned them invisible; what you see are these effects that I applied to them. The ace up my sleeve was that I blurred my drawings a specific amount for each effect, to soften and widen the shadows and highlights, to make it look like that soft, dry, fine sand.
After that, I rasterized all the effects, then rotated and distorted them to match the perspective of the beach, and placed them so it would look like the woman was just finishing writing the 2 in "MAC2". Finally, I did some retouching around her forefinger, to make it look like her finger was in the groove of the 2.
That last photo you see here is a detail from my work file showing part of the area where the woman has drawn "MAC2".