This is my completed shoe advertisement. I am happy with the way it turned out, and have few critiques. This ad was created by taking a photo of my Nike running shoe, and using the quick selection tool to take away the background of the photo, leave the shoe by itself. I then dragged the shoe into my other project that I had open, which was a orange-filled background. I added some effects to this background, and I used the layer styles to add a rocky pattern to it. Next, I worked on my text. I came up with a slogan that I thought would be stereotypical for running shoe ads. I came up with a phrase that is trying to persuade people to buy the shoes to be very good athletes, and the phrase was "For the Elite." I added a drop shadow to my text as well. My only complaint is that I would've liked to use a more readable font, however the one that I chose is not too bad. In terms of the shoe itself, I added a light stroke around it, in order to make it stand out just a little bit from the background and components behind it. I downloaded PNG's of the Nike logo and slogan, and placed them on my ad, giving them each a drop shadow, which made them have a larger presence in the ad. Finally, there is my favourite part of the ad, and the part that took the most work. This is the smoke effect behind the shoe. I saw something like this, but done with water, in one of the shoe ads that inspired me, and wanted to replicate something like it in my ad. I downloaded a photo of a smoke effect, along with a set of smoke brushes from a website, as I wanted to attempt to create the effect manually. I placed the downloaded picture at the back and used a blending mode to get rid of the white background on the image. I then used my smoke brushes to create a sort of exploding smoke effect behind the shoe, to make it feel as if it was being pushed toward the viewer. Afterwards, I used the eraser tool to smooth out the hard edges of the brush, to make the brush strokes look more round and natural. I used low opacity and hardnesses for the eraser to make subtle changes. After that my shoe ad was compete. I am impressed with my work. I learned a lot of new techniques with the eraser tool and brushes, which I will use again. As well, I also found out about adjustment layers from my partner, and was able to turn the blue smoke darker, by changing the hue and saturation on the adjustment layer and merging that with the original blue smoke layer.