My online class in Photoshop Essentials is over and our final exam was to do at least five different things to an image. I don't think I'm necessarily an overachiever, but I do have a hard time stopping when I'm having fun.
I have been having difficulty in choosing images to work with in this class. Why is it that in real life many photos are drab and lifeless, but when you want to find one for homework you can't? I have played with several photos and couldn't improve them very much, probably because I have a pretty decent camera that knows how to point-and-shoot.
So I decided to use the scan of one of my daily collages from last year. Because the photos were cut mostly from the newspaper, which uses mediocre paper and relatively low printing quality, they started out drab and lifeless, and maybe the scanning process squeezed a bit more life out of them. Doesn't this image cry out for improvement?
So I put the image into gray scale, improved its distribution of dark and light, posterized it, added color to the bread, straightened the fortune cookie fortune, and put lines around the thought box and the ballplayers.
All of which took a lot longer to do than to read about, thanks to a lot of trial and error. I'm still a learner, forever finding myself on the wrong layer and/or using the wrong tool.
But in a week, class 2 begins and I will no doubt learn way more things to do. I can hardly wait!
so are you planning on working on your collages a bit after they were done now?
ReplyDeleteI had actually thought that it might be a good daily art project to return to a collage from the same date in a previous year, then photoshop it. But I suspect I would get bored before the end of January. Maybe I'll do it for a month sometime.
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