Assignment #3 - Restoration

Another assignment has come and gone, which means it's time for another blog post! I always look forward to writing these, because I like to put my thoughts and feelings on projects into words that I can comprehend and look back on. I'm not entirely positive that running this blog is supposed to be the project I'm most invested into, though...

The finished restoration.

The goal for this project was restoring a worn-down photo and making it look brand new (well, as "brand new" as you can make an old, pixelated sepia-tone photo look). I didn't get to use a photo from my own family, primarily because I was surprised to learn that none of the several family members I asked had any old photos that I could use, so instead I went with one of the examples in the class folder... and, you know, I think I've honestly gotten attached to them. I have no idea who they're supposed to be, but editing them for so long has made me feel a sort of bizarre kinship towards this family. I'd like to think the second guy from the right would be cool to talk to.

The big tools for this project were the spot healing brush and the clone stamp tool. The spot healing brush was... alright? It's a genius tool in concept, but in practice it didn't help very much for the assignment. I mostly used the default "Content Aware" setting, as "Create Texture" was too harsh and "Proximity Match" was very hit-and-miss with where it drew color from. Even then, though, the spot healing brush smoothed out a lot of the grain and pixelation in the photo, which I ended up having to fix later. The Clone Stamp tool, on the other hand, was extremely useful, and I had a lot of fun pulling from different sources of the photo to recreate missing pieces of the photo. It's like the modern Frankenstein's monster... if, well, Frankenstein's monster looked more convincing and not like a freakish chimera of a man. I also got to use the Dodge and Burn tools a lot more compared to the Multiplicity assignment, and I think it really helped make the figures in the photo stand out more.

A comparison between the original, damaged photo and the final product. Big difference!

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results of this restoration. It was a bit challenging figuring out the division between nailing for an accurate recreation and sacrificing limitations of the photo-creation process in order to create something that looks more modern, but I think I hit a happy medium between the two. Here's to hoping the next project will be just as entertaining!

Assignment #2 - Multiplicity

A word of advice for all teachers and professors... never denote which of the assignments you'll give is supposed to be the easiest one. It'll just make the students who struggle feel a whole lot worse about the future of the course.

That's a lot of Amys... Amies? I don't know what the proper plurality is supposed to be.

The task was simple enough: use quick mask and layer masking tools to create the illusion of having multiple of the same figure in one composition. That was simple enough; in fact, it was pretty easy working with the example photos in class, and I learned a lot about how to adjust the layer masks to make them fit in better (including a lesson on what the Dodge and Burn tools are supposed to be for! I've seen them for years on GIMP and had no clue what they did).

Unfortunately, when trying to perform the same task on my own set of photos, I quickly ran into issues due to one simple mistake: being put in charge of photography. I've know for years that I'm not very good at it, and that I have incredibly shaky hands, but I was expecting the use of a tripod to be enough of a failsafe to prevent that from seriously impeding my work. Unfortunately, it somehow wasn't, and I ended up having to do a LOT of editing to fit together various different perspectives of the area into one picture.

Ultimately, it led to a final product that I'm... not too particularly enthusiastic about, but should definitely be serviceable enough. It makes me wish that I got to finish my original photoshoot, as it had the least camera issues but only 10 photos to work with... and it also makes me hope that I won't have to use a camera again for the rest of the semester, as I can't say I'm thrilled at the prospect of struggling in more assignments because of it.

For fun, I ended up making a second multiplicity photo using my scrapped first set of pictures. Way easier to put together.

Assignment 1 - Form Painting

The final product.

The first big assignment for this semester was learning how to use Photoshop's brush tools in order to make convincing paintings of 3-dimensional objects. I've used Photoshop sparingly in the past as part of web design courses, but that delved more into understanding tools related to graphic design, so learning about the program's more painting-oriented tools was a fresh topic. The whole process took a combined total of roughly four hours to complete.

Example of an unblended cone versus a blended sphere.

While I already understood some of the basic concepts like adjusting opacity or creating straight lines for forms, the Mixer Brush tool was completely new to me, and I'm impressed by what it can do. It took some time to get used to it... blending a palette of squares together is much easier than blending colors in a form together, but I eventually reached a point where I'm really satisfied with the end results. It's taught me a lot about putting shades and tints together on objects too, and I hope I can put this newly learned information to use in my own artistic endeavors by improving my own shading technique.