Rodents in Love

For my final homework assignment of the semester I focused on learning how to sharpen photographs utilizing photoshops awesome smart sharpen filter. 

Here is the image that I was able to create.

Final Project

Like I said in my previous post, I decide to do my final project on TED.com.  Ted is a really great website, and if you haven't yet visited it you really should.  Anyway, I created a cover based on what I thought would be an interesting image and idea for a ted talk.  

Here it is:

Final Oreintation

The following is my cover orientation for my online Photoshop final magazine project.  I have decided to create a magazine based on TED. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.  It is a conference held every year during which world class scientists, designers, architects, artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, etc share their ideas.  The tagline of my magazine and of the conference is "Ideas Worth Spreading."  The link to the website ishttp://www.ted.com

Photoshop Final Orientation

Question 4:

i) Early Magazine Covers
Early magazine covers where designed to pretty much look just like books.  There were very few pictures and the pictures that were present on magazine covers at the time either didn’t hint at what could be found inside the publication, but also sometimes didn’t even have anything to do with the articles inside that issue. Later covers started to display what were referred to as “Poster” art pieces.  These were images (painted or photographic in nature) which depicted either symbolically or literally the topics that were going to be discussed within the magazine.

ii) The Poster Cover: Pictures That Need No Words
Poster covers started to come into prominence in the early 1900’s.  In the beginning they were usually paintings or engravings that were more works of art than magazine covers.  They tended to be rather large and the title of the magazine was very seldom placed over them.  Rather the poster art was displayed front and center and the title of the magazine was relegated to the bottom or the top of the cover page.  Many famous artists created magazine cover art.  A few of the more well known ones were: Norman Rockwell, Charles Dana Gibson and Maxfield Parrish.  Johnson and Prijatel define the poster cover as one in which "there are no cover lines, or themes announced, and the image generally is not covered by the logo... Most poster covers between 1890 and 1940 didn't even relate to a story inside the magazine. Rather the poster cover depicted a season or conveyed a general mood" (241).

iii) Pictures Married to Type: The Quest for the Perfect Relationship
Magazines with type as well as pictures on their covers were also present in the early days of the magazine, but they were less common.  However, as the magazine industry evolved new magazines would sometimes take a risk and include cover lines on top of their cover images.  These cover lines ran the gamut from being “sneak peaks” inside the magazine (as to what the articles where about and such) all the way to shocking calls to arms or new and brazen ideas that were displayed front and center.  As time went on magazines began to pursue the “integrated cover” look.  This means that they started to shy away from having a big picture with the cover line relagated to the outside border, and began to combine pictures and words in a way that would better tell their story to their readers.  However, unlike many of today’s magazine covers you can tell that the image had a somewhat more important role than the print.  Things like models heads covering up the name of the publication where more common in the early integrated cover.  Some of the information that was conveyed in these early integrated covers was who the writers of the articles are and what articles could be found inside.  Some magazines even printed suggestions or advertisements on their covers.

iv) In the Forest of Words: Covers at the Turn of the 21st Century
For most magazines at the turn of the 21st century, cover lines were as important as cover art. (http://longleaf.net/coverlines/#anchor8144683)  Nowadays a fantastic picture or painting is rarely enough to get peoples attention.  More and more, vivid and large cover lines are utilized within the magazine industry to capture and hold readers attention.  In magazines today the cover image constantly overleafs with the various cover lines.  A completely new style of posing and photographing models has resulted due to the demand for more space for cover lines.  Also in today’s magazines the images are rarely in the foreground.  The cover lines usually take precedence.  It is possible that this gradual emergence of a cover line dominated magazine publishing paradigm hints at deeper truths about our society.  One of these truths is that we have, as a culture, lost a great deal of our attention span.  Another is that we are now, more than ever, creatures of pleasure and stimulation.  One could argue that the evidence seen on magazine covers from around the world is directly related to our collective desire for stimulation.

Question 5. Go to a magazine section of a large bookstore such as Barnes and Noble or Borders or an independent bookstore with a good magazine selection. Stand a few feet back from the display shelves, and scan the covers of numerous publications and write brief answers to the following questions:

1. Which magazines stand out?
The magazines that stood out to me where:  Time, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Discover, and Popular Mechanics.

2. How visible are the magazine mastheads on the magazines that I can see?
Every single magazine that I looked at in the Barnes and Noble in westgate had an extremely visible masthead.  All of their mastheads where at the top of the magazine so that you could see them even if they where behind another magazine (due to the stadium row like configuration of Barnes and nobles magazine shelf.)

3. Describe three possible strategies in cover design that work to get your attention.
The three strategies that I observed that really worked for me where:  A picture of a gorgeous half naked women, a shocking image, and a brand name magazine with a beautiful photo on the cover.  Personally, I don’t really spend very much time reading magazines.  When I do read them I tend to read the same ones and these where the ones that caught my eye at the store.  Also, all of the magazines that caught my attention where all at eye level, and they didn’t have any magazines in front of them.  In other words I was able to see their entire front covers clearly.  As for the half naked women and the shocking image, well, both of these examples of imagery do a lot more for me than any cover line ever could.  For me, images really are worth more than words.  So, at first, I will always approach a magazine that has an interesting image on its cover rather than a magazine that does not.

4. What do you think makes a successful  cover?
As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, what makes for an interesting cover in my eyes is a beautifully shot, provocative, or unique image.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that certain fonts are beautiful and I think that cover line design and structure and copy are all important, but they don’t even come close to what a great cover image does for me.  It really is as simple as the fact that I won’t pick up a magazine with an uninteresting cover image on it.  Also, the name of the magazine (its masthead) must be clearly visible to me, even from 10 feet away.  Because I don’t read a lot of magazines I will tend to gravitate towards the ones that I already know.  This makes the title of the magazine extremely relevant to me.  If I can see and recognise the title, I am much more likely to walk over and pick up the magazine.  

The Escape

For this weeks homework I got to work on two very interesting concepts.  The first is the idea of depth of field inside a photograph.  I really liked this tutorial because it's definitely a skill that will come in handy when I go to edit my future photographs.  I feel like it really adds to the image and it's super simple to use too!

The other homework this week was to really get to know layers and the way they interact with each other by doing the text tutorial on compositing layers.  The best part about this tutorial was learning how you can sink one layer into another.  Thanks to Photoshop's incredible layering power I was able to take a moon and place it into a cloudy sky and have the clouds come up and around the moon.  This was so cool and it's a technique that I am totally going to use a lot more of in the future.

Here are the two images that I created for this weeks homework.  I hope you like them:

Election

This week in Photoshop I learned how to use the pen tool.  Specifically I discovered that you can create all kinds of shapes with the pen tool and that you can use photoshops layer structure to duplicate and scale these shapes to create a lot of fun and interesting action in the graphic.  Here is the image that I created this week:

Photoshop CS5 Mid Term

The following was my Mid Term Proposal:

Mid Term Proposal

I would like to propose to do my mid term collage on Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection.  The collage will include imagery of Charles Darwin himself as well as images that document his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle.  

This topic is important because it represents one of the single greatest discoveries and realizations that humankind has had the privilege of making in it’s entire existence as a species.  That is that mankind, and all life, for that mater, evolved through a process of natural selection.  Darwin’s understanding of this fact led him to write a book, “The Origin of the Species” which would forever change the way we viewed the world and our place in it.  No longer could we say that we were the rulers, and that all other creatures must bow down to our will, because we knew that we were only different by degree, and not by nature.  

The message of my montage will be to help people see both the history of Charles Darwin’s discovery of the theory of natural selection, but to also help them understand why it is such a monumental thing; and worthy of commemoration.  When people look at my collage I would like them to see the beauty and the simple truth of living things.  Ultimately, I hope that my collage informs people and spikes their curiosity to learn more.  It’s even possible that the piece might insight some heated debate or uncomfortableness.  That’s OK with me too.  People where uncomfortable when Galileo said that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around.  But, like with most things, people eventually got over their initial fear of the “new” and embraced the truth.

Retouching, Healing, and Image Editing Using Photoshop CS5

This week in our Photoshop CS5 class we utilized several of Photoshop CS5's very good image retouching and image healing tools to improve some photos.

Honestly, I these tools represent the main reason why most people decide to learn how to use Photoshop.  They are all very powerful tools and applying them correctly to a photograph can really make it sing.

I was particularly amazed at some of the things you could do with the healing brush and the history brush.  By flipping images and taking symmetrical samples from the images I was able to completely make a large paint scar go away in one of the photos. 

This kind of seamless image editing is exactly what I love about Photoshop.  And it's definitely worth knowing.

Here are the two images that I worked on for this weeks class: