I believe space has a personality. The aesthetics of a particular space heavily affect my immediate impression of the space. Spaces that I have particular emotional connections to have the ability to evoke a variety of feelings. For my “tiny world” image project, the space I chose to photograph was the Oval area of Ohio State’s campus on a snowy morning. I have a strong emotional connection to Ohio State because of the growth and memories I have experienced here and this space is representative of that to me. I work part-time as a tour guide while in school and I walk across this space through all types of weather talking about how much I love it, so it has a special meaning to me. I believe this is an example of how space can reflect something larger about ourselves. As a college student and proud Buckeye, it is easy to relate to this space because it feels like home to me. I feel very personally connected to this space because it is a symbol for so much more that has happened in my life and a constant throughout my time in college.

I knew immediately that I wanted to photograph the Oval for this project because I love the area and how it looks during this time of year. I followed the instructions from Spoon Graphics’s YouTube tutorial closely because I am still working on becoming more familiar with Photoshop. I found that using my own photos was much more difficult than the “tiny worlds” that I created in class. It was difficult to edit a photo with lots of people walking to class in it, and I had trouble adjusting the sky around the trees. I ended up using the clone stamp tool for the majority of this. Other tools I used frequently in this process include the eraser, opacity adjustments, free transform, and spot healing tools. Using my own photos was a new challenge for me but ultimately allowed me to use new techniques to achieve my desired results.

I used a number of tools to remove the tattoos and freckles in this photo, which was a very experimental process for me. I began with the freckles, mainly using the spot healing brush on the content aware setting to do so. I adjusted the brush softness based on the area, and used the create texture setting on the larger areas of her cheeks. The tattoos were a bit more difficult, and I alternated between using the spot healing brush and the clone stamp tools. I had the most difficulty with the lighter colored tattoos that covered large areas of her arm. I ended up using the content aware healing tool, then going over it with the “create texture” setting to even out certain areas.

I then placed her on a new interior background by uploading a new photo and anchoring it as the background layer. I used the quick selection tool to outline the general background around the person, then used the de-select option of the quick selection tool to make sure I had all of the areas of her hair that I wanted to include before deleting the original background. This was much more difficult to do than the last photo I worked with (which was a nature landscape and required less exactness than a person). I used the eraser tool to work on the layer of the person, adjusting the opacity and softness as I went. This helped the hair and other softer areas of the photo look more natural against a new background.

This was a learning experience for me not only in terms of figuring out how to make the desired edits effectively, but also in becoming familiar with the platform and workspace as a whole. I understand the difference between destructive and non-destructive editing now, a new concept for me. I became much more comfortable with some tools, particularly spot healing and quick selection. I would like to become more familiar with ways to make people look more natural on new backgrounds as well as how to smooth out skin. I also had some trouble learning the patch tool, which I would like to be able to use more effectively. I feel much better about trying new things in regards to editing and being willing to go back and redo things differently when something does not produce my desired result.

I chose to replace the grass and the sky in the lava field image, adding a mountain background and trees instead. I used the selection tool to select the areas that I wanted to delete and moved the layers so that the original lava field was highest. I mostly used the quick selection tool for this. I struggled with using the magic wand tool on areas like the rocks that contained lots of similar colors, so I switched to the quick selection tool for that reason. On the following images, I used the desaturate feature on the mountain layer, the posterize adjustment on the rocks layer, and the flip vertical transformation on the tree layer. I wanted to experiment with the ways I could alter certain layers in respect to the whole photo.

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