DMIS10C, Midterm

Larger Version

The way the transparency is rendered on blogger is driving me nuts. I can't seem to figure it out, so I've included a link to a larger version of the image, available for download...


There are only a handful of media through which to express and communicate ideas: Paintings and Drawings, Sculptures, and Spoken or Written Language. However, two of these three are inherently flawed as a medium to circulate ideas and emotion. Spoken or Written Language as a medium cannot be universally understood and generally carries cultural meanings that would fall short on those who are unfamiliar or uninitiated; A middle-man interpreter is generally needed for spoken or written texts to cross cultural and language barriers. Sculptures are static and generally can only be viewed by those who seek them out. However, paintings and drawings transcend these flaws. For the modern age, Photoshop empowers anyone to create aesthetically pleasing drawings and paintings, or manipulate photographs, to concisely convey their ideas in a way that can be understood universally and can be spread easily.
The video, "Is Photoshop remixing the world", discusses how Photoshop is used in the modern age as a tool of expression, specifically with various internet memes. One meme from the video that stands out is the Thumbs & Ammo meme. This meme is remarkable because it doesn't require accompanying text and generally involves popular icons that are recognizable across the world. Because these popular icons are used in this meme, the message that is carried in the Photoshopped image can be understood universally. An example of this is the Photoshopped picture of Rambo, a popular action-hero, from the most recent Rambo film, where John Rambo is giving two thumbs up. The scene in the movie where the original picture is from is a visceral scene where Rambo is operating a large machine-gun to carry out a massacre, but the Photoshopped version for the meme has the machine-gun removed and the hand gestures replaced with the two thumbs-up. This carries a universal message of "Peace instead of War", and the way it is conveyed in the image transcends cultural and language barriers. This specific image and the way it conveys its message would not have been possible without Photoshop.
In my collage, I wanted to express the idea that this use of Photoshop is not limited to any specific brand of ideas. It can be used to convey ideas both new and old, in a way that can be understood across the world without the need for an interpreter.

Source Images Used:
Predator UAV Drone
Apple iPhone 5
Nissan Sedan
Acer Aspire Laptop
Planet Earth
The Forbidden City
Ancient Greek Structure
Giza Pyramids
Discus Thrower
Sphinx

DMIS10C, Lab 7

Lab #7 was somewhat interesting though I didn't learn much in this lab (besides the history of photography), given my experience with previous versions of Photoshop.

I mostly played with blur filters, noise filters, pixelate filters, brightness/contrast, and levels.
There are 7 layers that were used to create this image. I had actually intended to use some of the texture filters that I knew from the previous versions, but could not find them in the latest Photoshop. Perhaps some stuff was moved around, but either way, I ended up being able to pull off the intended effects without needing those filters.

Step by step:

1. I first desaturated and resized the original image.
2. I noticed that in the first-ever photograph, there are very few midtones between shadows and highlights, so I went ahead and increased the contrast (from the brightness/contrast dialog) and I played with the levels so that the darkest tones weren't too dark, and lightest tones weren't too light, and with very few midtones in between.
3. I used the crystallize filter to add a jagged edge to all of the shapes in the photograph, and then used Gaussian Blur to soften the now-jagged shapes.
4. I decided that the picture didn't look washed out enough, so I used the lasso tool around where the highlights should be washed out and filled in additional highlights. I did this four times, each time on a new layer. Each of these highlight shapes were also blurred in various ways so that they didn't have a hard shape, and then set to "Overlay" blending mode.
5. I noticed that there were a large number of bright speckles in the first-ever photograph's shadows, and a number of dark speckles in the highlights. I created one new layer for each of these, one for bright speckles and one for dark speckles. For each of these, I generated gaussian monochromatic noise, then crystallized with a size of 3 pixels, and then blur-more. Lastly, I went over each of these speckle layers with a very soft eraser brush to make it non-uniform. The bright speckles layer is set to lighten, whereas the dark speckles layer is set to darken.

Some possible improvements: I think the clouds in this turned out too clean, even though they were given the same treatment as everything else. Perhaps there needs to be more of a noisy dither on the clouds to make the result more convincing.

Here's the final result:

Larger Version

Some bizarre stuff that I've noticed: When uploading images to Blogspot, the images are actually compressed a lot. This means that the Blogspot version looks really different from the one that I consider to be my finished iteration!
I've included the "Larger Version" as a link to an alternative host that doesn't affect the quality of the image.


Source images used:
Swan Lake, Montana

DMIS 10C, Homework 6

This week's homework was to learn about and play with layer masks, and to produce a composite image using masks. We were also to use a poem, "Beginning" by James Wright, for inspiration.

Here's my resulting composition:

Larger Version

I did end up using a number of techniques in this besides masking and adjustment layers. The tree, the wheat field, and the floating girl ended up taking a lot of brushwork. I also used the clone stamp tool in a few places to pull off the foggy horizon.

I'm not satisfied with the way the creation of masks is presented in the in-class material; I am finding a lot of unsightly jagged edges and other problems around the masked images, due to the soft nature of the selection generated by the Color Selection Tool. When you have multiple layers using the same mask with soft edges, the problem is exacerbated. It is possible to correct these problems by brushing the alpha mask, but that is very very time consuming.

I ended up having to do a few tricks to hide these ugly edges.

I used the following images in this composition:
The Tree
The Aurora Borealis
The Floating Girl
The Wheat Field
The Moon

- Miguel SuVasquez