Exercise #1
I picked both images from pexels.com. The first layer is the one with the buildings to which I added the Gaussian Blur, the dodge tool, and the New York text. The pink beach image was used in layer blending with "dark color".
Exercise #2
The font chosen is Cooper std in italic form. I then went to pexels.com and chose a picture of a museum and decided to use the painting as the clipping mask option. I implemented a tan colored background to compliment the rasterized text.