Assignment

Using one of your photos —
Fix something......examples: change eye color, fix blemish, give yourself a new moustache, etc.
Filter it.....

Implementation

Before: This is a scan of a photograph of my grandfather back when he worked for AT&T (“Ma Bell”, not the recent incarnation). As you can see, the original photo had some serious damage done to it due to creases and rubbing.

Before:

Fixed: Straightened, cropped, removed color cast, corrected exposure. Removed dust and specs of dirt. Lots and lots of healing brushes, patches, smudges (especially smudges with varying filters, like “color burn” even though it was B&W), and a lot more stuff that I can't remember to try to eliminate the damage.

Filtered: I used the “Adaptive Wide Angle” filter two or three times with the fisheye setting, followed by cropping and a few other tweaks to fix the artifacts the filter added. I wanted it to look realistic, not flashy—like something that could possibly have been done in-camera rather than as an effect. I really like how the room seems to curve around him. It kind of looks like he's inside of a nuclear reactor control room or something.

Instructor's comments

Great photo to start with - fix is well done - filtered is art!

Assignment

Choose 1 descriptive/action word about you. Start your project large: 3000 x 2400 (to be saved as .psd). Must be at least 5 layers; all layers must be labeled. Must have these layers:

• Your descriptive word (can be big in background, can be all over, etc. - make it noticeable)
• A photo of you (you can filter, etc.); a large face shot or an action shot make the most interesting collage
• Your name signed like a signature in bottom right hand corner
• The others are your choice - try to make it a collage about you. Think about it as a portfolio website and someone hits the "About Me" link. What collage photos would describe you?

You will save and turn in the file in 3 ways: (1) Save large file with layers as .psd; (2) save large file for .jpg print (Save As > .jpg); (3) Compress and Save for Web: Change the image size of file to 1000 wide and Save for Web (compressed saved as .jpg) under 300KB.

Here is a sample list of words: devoted, sweet, cool, lost, determined, puzzled, random, confused, peaceful, driven, amazing, fierce, unforeseen, and graceful

Implementation

I've been a "techie" my whole life, as you can see from these photos. Background photos (L-R, top to bottom):

1. At a computer in the 90's
2. Playing with toy cars as a wee lad
3. Representing the California IPv6 Task Force at a convention
4. Showing off the printout of one of my first programs
5. (hiding between the "e" and the "c") My first camera
6. (between "c" and "h") Co-instructor at a weekend science program for youth
7. A "face shot" of me
8. 14 servers and a bundle of cabling in the server room where I last worked
9. Me assembling a stereo system for my grandparents
10. Co-camp director at Space Endeavour Camp at Vandenberg AFB helping kids launch their first model rockets
11. At a rocket launch hosted by the model rocketry and R/C aircraft club I helped found
12. Working as staff at a computer at the Endeavour Academy, an applied sciences program at my old high school
13. A vendor at the GovTech conference in Sacramento

Inside the letters:

• T: The mainboard (motherboard) of a computer I built myself [Darkone, CC BY-SA 2.5]
• e: Nikon lens I would like for my camera [Hiyotada, CC0]
• c: Some Dell servers [DSV, Public Domain]
• h: Samsung Galaxy S6 (my newest smart phone) [Kārlis Dambrāns, CC BY 2.0]
• i: Baofeng UV-5R handitalkie amateur radio (lic #KK6UAJ) [Baofeng]
• dot over i: A laser refracting (just because it looks cool!) [CILAS, CC BY-SA 3.0]
• e: Java code I wrote in CISP 401 last year

Instructor's comments

WOW! You put a lot of work into this one. It turned our fantastic ~