Tiny World

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.

Tattoos and Freckles

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.

Lava Field

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.