Digital Wizard 2006 Winners

$1,000 GRAND PRIZE WINNER

"She reminded me of a Modigliani," Craig Gordon, of Port Washington, NY, says, of the woman in the most popularly used contest image. Although the original, with her tank top and ponytail, is much more modern than those painted by the Italian artist nearly 100 years ago, the 38-year-old graphic designer's savvy technique in Adobe Photoshop transformed her entirely.

Gordon used a mask to select the woman and temporarily removed her head to lengthen the neck, then distorted her features with the Liquify filter. He used the Clone Stamp to flatten her chest, and painted her a new hair style. Next, he created a window frame by taking one from the city image and using an Alien Skin filter to give the wood more texture. He used the hot-air balloon to create a pattern for the tablecloth, and masked out a statue and transformed the swimming pool image for the two objects on the table.

You can see more of this winning artist's work at www.craiggordon.com.

$300 1ST PRIZE WINNER

Pop Photo staffers agreed: Although the foreground of this image is striking, it's the levitating cows in the background that really make it stand out.

Recent college graduate and budding graphic designer Joel Messner, 22, sees the motif of his work as fairly logical. "I was trying to see what I could do with the images," explains the Gilbert, AZ, resident. "I came across the girl and I thought -- all right, aliens. And then I came across the cow and I thought -- all right, abductions. Those were my two thoughts. Girl aliens are scary, and abducting cows is funny."

He used six of the images -- four as components of the image, and two to create brushes or add color -- and spent about five hours working in Photoshop. The eerie background is a modification of the bright blue sky in the daredevil image.

To transform the previously harmless-looking female, Messner used the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush to blot out the eyes. And for texture, he created a brush from a crumbling wall in another image to, as he put it, "intensify the shadows on the side of the eyeless young lady's face."

$200 2nd PRIZE WINNER

Ramel Romero, 29, of Savannah, GA, who is employed as a physical therapist, says graphic design is "just a hobby." For a hobbyist, he put together a very impressive image, in just three hours with Corel Paintshop Pro 9. First, he resized elements to create a tableau, then used the Clone and Deformation tools to change the shape of the balloon and ramp, and to add shadows and reflections for realism. "I wanted to turn the tables," Romero explains. "Instead of us people watching the guinea pig running circles on the wheel, I wanted to turn it around so [the guinea pig] gets to watch the stunt and be the spectator."

$150 3rd PRIZE WINNER

Jodi Frye discovered Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 in the spring of 2002, and "after a few months of fiddling with the program, I was hooked on computer graphics and I never looked back." The self-professed "stay-at-home mom" and freelance graphic designer from Fort Johnson, NY, approached this project as if it were a collage, starting with the image of the woman and adding different elements to create the setting around her, with "bits and pieces" of as many images as possible. To create the reflection in the coffee table, she made a duplicate of the center of the image, flipped it, and used Transform to adjust the positioning of the angles. How many of the images can you spot? Of the 12 posted for the contest, Frye used all but one: "I liked the challenge of it," she explains.

$100 HM PRIZE WINNER

David Ellsworth couldn't tell if it was a hamster or a mouse -- he "just kind of knew I wanted to use it somehow," the 31-year-old graphic designer from Pembroke, MA, says. "I first used the plane image, like he was the 'Red Baron'. Then I stuck him other places to see what came up." This rodent-under-fire picture took eight hours of meticulous editing in Photoshop CS2, using the Pen tool to select certain areas and "a lot of brushes" to paint in camouflage and shadows in the background.

$100 HM PRIZE WINNER

2005 Grand-Prize winner David Birkbeck, 47, caught our eye again with a 14-layer image, made in Photoshop CS2 and inspired by Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. "Most of it was cut-and-paste, rotating, and resizing," the Portland, OR, machinist (www.daimage.com) says. "Nothing fancy." We were impressed that he did it the day of the deadline, submitting it at 11:59 p.m. on March 31.