Photomontage

I researched Martha Rosler and her photomontage series that she does. I particularly liked the 'Bringing Home the War' series and decided to have a go at one of these myself.
I took a few images around my house to use in my photomontage. Most of my motage has been created using the lasso tool and the add and subtract from selection options.

This is my final photomontage:

I quite like it and think that it is quite like Roslers photomontages. Overall im really happy with the outcome.

Joiner

This is my joiner, inspired by Hockney:

I researched a bit about David Hockney and his 'Joiners' I had a go at one myself.

I took a series of pictures to used to create my joiner. I cut parts out of the image out and pasted them in the new image. I used the distort tool and changed sizes and angles of the layers to create something a little bit different. Overall I quite like the outcome of my joiner.

Examples of stop motion animaton

This is a really good example of stop motion animation.



This is another example of stop motion animation but not as good as the first one.



An obvious example of stop motion animation is MORPH

Another try at stop motion animation

I found doing the last stop motion animation fun and quite easy. So I decided to have another go, this time with more pictures.

CLICKY!!!!!!!!!!!

Having a go at stop animation,

Firstly I took a picture of a Coke can. Then I crushed it a bit and took another picture. I then did this twice more.
Then I went into photoshop and opened all four pictures. Then I got stages 2,3 and 4 and copied them into image one, keeping the background image (image 1) locked. I then resized the image to 600pixels by 450pixels. Next I went to 'file', 'save for web' and clicked 'animate' and set the frame delay to 0.2 seconds. I then clicked save and viewed it and it worked. :D

(Okay that didnt work at all. However this link should work. CLICKY )

Stop Animation

Stop motion (also known as stop-action or frame-by-frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using clay is described as clay animation.

example of stop animation: (which didnt work so its gone)

David Hockney. Research

David Hockney works with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work which has an affinity with Cubism

 His photomontage workk appeared mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective.

Martha Rosler. Research

Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Most of her work concerns social issues. Rosler's career retrospective, "Positions in the Life World," was exhibited in five European cities and two museums in New York City. Rosler lives in Brooklyn, New York.

These are 2 images from her 'Bringing Home the War' series. They both show glamorous people in a war zane, which shows that some people think war is glamorous, but then there is the small reminders to show its not, such as, the the bottom one there are the dead people laying in the chairs

Compositing an image pt2 continued......

First of all, I cropped the background to make the image more focused on the boat rather than the scenery.
Then using the magic wand tool and the add/subtract from selection options, I cut out the boat and pasted it onto the background image, I then used the eraser with a soft edge and an opacity of about 30 to rub the edges around the spray from the boat to make them look more realistic. I then accidently rubbed out a bit of the front of the boat, but because the opacity was low it didnt do much and looks like a blur, so I left it :). I then used the magnetic lasso tool to loosly select the sky and right side of the image, and applied a motion blur filter with a pixel size of 10. Then I selected the trees and bushes on the left and set a motion blur of 2 pixels. I then touched up the image with the blur tool just to finish it off.

Compositing an image. pt 2

To Create my image by adding an object from another image, I cut out the car using the magic wand tool and the add/subtract from selection options. I resized the car correctly and created a copy of the layer. I then added a motion blur to the layer and erased some of the parts that werent neccesary. I then got a picture of a dust trail and cut it out using the magic wand tool. Then i used the eraser with about 35/40% transparency to make the dust look realistic.

Compositing an image

To create this image I took the background image and an image of a plane. Firstly I used the magic wand tool, using the add and subtract from selection tools aswell, to cut the plane out from its background. I then pasted it into the background in this image. I then copied the layer and added a motion blur to it. Next I erased part of the layer to leave a blurry trail behind the plane. I then added a blur to the background layer which causes the plane to be in focus and look alot more realistic.

This filter is called 'sumi-e'. All it really does is make the main part of the picture really dark, darkening the darker tones. I fiddled with the settings untill I got an image that I thought looked reasonably decent.

Filters - dark strokes

For this image I used the 'dark strokes' filter. basically I applied the filter and fiddled with the settings to make the dark parts of the image alot bolder. This filter also blurred the background a bit more which is quite good.

Filter - pinch

For the pinching filter I created a 'fish eye' effect. to do this I set the filter to 'pinch' the image by - 79%. Then I clicked 'OK'

The image I was left with has a 'fish eye' effect to it.

Filters - liquify

The filter I used here is the 'Liquify' filter which allows you to 'smudge' your image. Basically I just found a part of the image I wanted to distort or curl and used the filter to do so, by 'stretching' the image using the brush.

This is the edited image. I curled all the points on the wings and made the eyes distorted.

Editing using the colour brush

To create this image I used the hue/saturation tool to make it all black and white. I then used the colour brush and chose a suitable colour to colour the part I wanted in. For instance on the milk bowl I used yellow and reduced the opacity to about 50%.

I like this method of editing however it is quite time consuming and you have to concentrate alot to get the edges right. 

Using the 'Warming' filter

Warming an image is a fairly easy process. First of all I opened my image in photoshop. I then clicked on the adjustment layer in the layers pallet. I then clicked on 'photo filter' and the filter box appeared. I then made sure it was on the 'warming' filter and the colour was set to a warm colour like orange. I then adjusted the density of the filter, and when I was happy with what it looked like I applied the filter.

 

 The image with warming filter applied.

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle is a photographer who aslo directs music videos and advertisements. He uses colour really well, and makes all of his photographs as bright and visually appealing as possible. Most of his images are digitally enhanced using photoshop to achieve these bright, bold colours. Using these bright, vivid colours drag you into the picture and make you study it. Many of his photographs are surreal and different. for example the image below where the massive burger has 'fallen' onto he woman would have been edited in photoshop where he can play around with the colours make the image seem more surreal.

Colour Variations

Above you can see the before and after of the editing process while i was using the colour variations tool.

I changes the midtones, shadows, highlights and saturation to get the colours to be bright and vibrant.

This is the final image. The colours are bright and warm. you can 'feel' the sunlight in the photo.

Monochrome editing

This is my origional image.

To get the image to look like this I changed the saturation to -100 to make the image black and white. I then changed the contrast to create some interesting shapes and shades. Finally I inverted the image to change everything that was white to black and everything that was black to white.

I then used the colourize option to create this image. To do this I clicked on the colourize box and moved the slider to a positition that gave me a colour that I liked. I like the darkness in the clouds and the water in this image.

This is the hue/saturation option box. which shows how I made the image black and white. Also in this image is the invert option. This shows you how I inverted the image.

Colourizing and using hue/saturation

This is the origional image. its a bit dull so I used the hue/saturation and colourize tools to make it better.

This is the first edited image. I decided to make the water more interesting by changing the colour to something abnormal, but not too wierd, so purple was the best choice. Although I think it looks a little better I think there are now to many colours in the photo.To change the colour of just the water I used the lasso tool to select the area of water and created a new layer containing just the water. I then went onto the  hue/saturation option and turned it to 'colourize' this allowed me to turn the water to many colours of the spectrum by moving the slider left and right to get the desired colour, then using saturation I could decide how vivid I wanted the selected colour.

Here I  have made everything black and white,except for the water. I did this by selecting the background layer and moving the saturation slider all the way to the left.  This focusses attention to the water. I like this picture because its different, but I do think the purple is too differerent.

Here is the same image again but with the water with a more normal bluey colour, rather than an extravagant purple.

image edit

Above is the origional image. It is very washed out and over exposed. Below the origional is the edited image. I edited the image by cropping it to make the composition better and I adjusted the colours using the levels tool. I also adjusted the brightness and contrast a little. I think the edited image looks alot better because the colours are more vibrant and it is not to over or under exposed.

Levels

Above is the origional cropped image and below is the edited version. to get the colours in the sky brighter and to look nicer i used the levels tool to adjust the colour, brightness and contrast.

1. The histogram is a graph that shows you the amount of pixels of each colour in the picture, and it shows RGB(red, green, blue)

2. An under exposed image is where the image is to dark. An overexposed image is where there is too much light in the photo. a correctly exposed image is where there is the correct amount of light in the photo. also the histogram to the left of the image is spread out all over the graph.

3.A high key image is when the image is mostly made of white and a low key image is where the image is made of mostly black pixels.

4. Levels can improve the the vividness of the colours and make the image less washed out

5. I used the magnetic lasso tool to select the sky to change the levels. you could also use the magic wand tool or the lasso tool.

Cropping

Above is the origional image with the cropped image below. To crop it I used the crop tool to select the part of the photo I want. I decided to get rid of the blurry dark part of the picture in the foreground.