For several weeks we have been focusing our attention on learning how to do composite portraits and GIFs after we learned some basics from Adobe Lightroom. Peter, our teacher, often tells us this is a new world of experimentation, of having fun, and it is.
In one class he said the following: “Creativity is not something you’re born with, it’s an act, and the more you do it the more creative you become, it’s not about talent, it’s not about genius, it’s not about any particular way of doing something, it’s about having fun…”
We entered this world of fun with two new tasks. In the first one we had to create a composite portrait, done with the images we had taken previously and had exported from Lightroom into Photoshop.
In this task we had to experiment with different tools from Photoshop such as the marquee, transform, erase, warp, and many more tools. We had to assign masks to the layers to avoid destroying the original image. We had to play around with the properties of the image, such as the saturation, the balance of whites, the exposure, the contrast, etc. We had to move things around, create new groups of layers, put one layer on top of the other, all of them to create that effect in our portrait that we wanted.
Task 03: Experimenting with Photoshop tools
At the end of the task, I was happy with the result obtained from the composite portrait. Since I started playing around with the different tools, I wanted the portrait to tell a story. That is why it has three components. The intention with each component was to connect it with the other component. In the first one, the eyes are directed toward the next one, in the second one, the lips point to the third one and in the last one, the eyes look up to the second one.
Task 03: Final Composite Portrait
The intention of changing the colours was to create focal points. Therefore, the first component has the brightest colour, this immediately focuses the attention of the viewer to that part. The other colours are more subtle, and it allows the viewer to easily focus on each one of them.
For the other task we had to do something even more fun, we had to create GIFs. I don’t know if I’m going to start working and only creating GIFs, but it was something very fun to learn how to do.
Task 04: Playing with parameters for the GIF
This task involved experimenting with frames, time intervals, layers, sequences, rendered colours, number of frames, tween frame animation, filters, blending modes, dither and non dither, and many more presets and properties that would make the GIF look the way I intended it to look like.
The result was something that at the beginning it was not intended to be a GIF, I was playing with the filter gallery and seeing what happened when the texture and the scale of the texture was edited. But by playing with the sliders, it made me think that the image looked like a loop that would reflect and simulate how the universe works, and how something is composed with a million smaller bits. The end result was pretty fun, and I was very happy with it.
Task 04: Final GIF
At the beginning, the GIF was only composed with the same colour of the image, but I added the idea of the loop by creating the image going from bigger to smaller and vice versa. In the second part of the GIF, I changed the colour, I added a layer mask in black and white to create a different effect. That idea of life beginning (with bright colours) and ending (with the black and white).
It was an easy GIF to do, but when I tried to do it again in a more organized way, that is when it got more complicated. One of the complicated parts was making all these editions on a layer mask and not on the layer per se. I had to duplicate the layer several times and I had to apply the filter directly to the image. But I tried creating a new layer, applying the mask to that layer and then clipping that to the actual image. It did work but it was a long process and I ended up with a lot of layers.
Task 04: GIF Version 02
All this experimentation is getting us ready for the next task, one that I’m kind of scared of starting because of the nature of it. But what I have learned in this class is that everything seems a lot more difficult that it is. It’s just a matter of starting and letting the creativity flow in the process. Obviously, easier said than done.
Comments