Digital Imaging Class Week one Assignment one
Exercise:
- Find an unaltered photograph by searching the Web (look for an image that looks like it was shot with a camera).
- Then find a similar but digitally altered image (an image that has been created or manipulated in a digital imaging program like Photoshop). For example: a photograph of a swan on a lake and another of a swan digitally placed on the rings of Saturn, or a shot of someone’s face compared to the same face digitally enhanced or manipulated in Photoshop.
- Describe and identify the manipulated elements. How do you think the image was altered? What tools/techniques do you think were used? Which one you think is most effective and why. Include the links/URL for each image in your comparison.
Submission:
I did a digital images and art search in Google, as required for this assignment and found some great web sites that I thought I would share with the class. The Digital Artist (http://www.thedigitalartist.com/) is an online portfolio gallery that is centered toward marketing the artwork of several digital artists. It was created by Carol Pentleton. This site showcases the work of many artists and offers advice and tips to aid the digital artists in marketing and web presence. Another web site that I checked out was Art.Net (http://www.art.net/studios/digital.html) which also showcased portfolios of many talented artists.
For my image search, I used an image from my photobucket.com account. Here is the before image. http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii215/ohmniversedesigns/raw.jpg
and here is the after image http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii215/ohmniversedesig
ns/ethan_5th_birthday.jpg. I thought I might as well use my own.
As you can see in the raw image, there were some improvements that needed to be made. I took this image with my digital camera and the size was 1024 x 769. I
transferred the image to my computer with the media slot (SD drive) through my SD card. I opened this photo in with Photoshop CS3. I wanted to remove all the extra background that I thought didn’t need to be in the picture and I couldn’t get rid of the cup in front of the cake without cutting out the cake (any suggestions here?). I used the crop tool to define the area that I wanted to keep in the picture. The biggest thing was the red eyes caused by the reflection of light in my son’s eyes from the flash of the camera. I used the red eye removal tool and used the zoom tool to increase the magnification of the image so that I could see the area I wanted to remove the red eye from better. After getting all the red out of his eye area, I increased the canvas 1 inch on each side of the photo and gave it a colored background of black. I decided to put a border around the image. I decided to use the diagonal line tool and increased the size to 10px. I used the color picker to change the color to match a shade of green in his birthday cake. I inserted 4 lines around the photo to box in and give the illusion of a border. I have downloaded several brush plug-ins and chose one that went along with his Buzz Light Year themed birthday party and cake. I chose a techno brush style. I used a shade of purple and red with the aid of the color picker for the brush color styles. I also used the same color green that I had chose for the border. I added a text line in the same shade of purple as the brush styles to write “Happy 5th Birthday Ethan!” and I chose a (can’t remember the name, sorry) font in the size of 24 pixel. I decided to change the image size and resolution for better web viewing. I changed the size to a 6 x 6 canvas or 569 wide by 493 pixels high with a resolution of 100. Then I went to file and used the “Save for Web” option to optimize my photo. I could have used GIF or JPEG as a file extension for this photo. Since it was a photo and I wasn’t concerned so much about the quality to print, I chose a JPEG at Maximum selection and saved my photo. This compressed my photo and changed the dpi to 96 which is the maximum suggested resolution for web viewing.
I decided that since I no longer have time to research the occult and conspiracies and what not because I am too busy with learning how to do web design and I don’t have time to do both. I thought I would share my class assignments. It is funny to see how much this stuff influences my work. I have the creative fever. It is like magick. I create things. I direct my will and I recreate emotion.
This is the stuff that is on my mind at present