Composing Digital Media with Emma Cichocki

My general focus was on Photoshop, I have always had an interest in advertising and today it seems very hard to find an ad that doesn’t have some aspect of editing, I knew from the start I wasn’t as interested in body retouching but in adding animation, text or capturing the eye by enhancing a photo all seemed like very usable skills… If I’m being honest I also just really loved the idea of being able to put things in pictures that didn’t belong there, my passion is in adding whimsicality to reality and photo-shop seemed like a perfect tool for that. And so it began… I had never used photo shop and so even the adobe window seemed extremely intimidating at first… but that didn’t stop me (mostly because this was a graded assignment). Anyway I think one of the most difficult assignments was the preliminary curriculum, that amount of specific planning ahead was something I’ve never really had to do before so while sitting in my room trying to map out a schedule I realized I had to do some research in order to give myself enough to do, I didn’t even know enough about photoshop to know what I wanted to know about photo shop! Lucky for me it was not very hard to be inspired, simply searching cool things to do with photoshop gave me a wealth of some extremely unimaginable skills along with some seemingly manageable ones. The ladder being what I set my goals and checkpoints using. I feel like my specific goings on were covered in my two log sheets so for this reflection I intend to broach broader areas of my experience.

I found I did a lot more of this work at home than I intended to, I figured I would have needed to log hours in the various computer labs around campus as to utilize the adobe program but what I didn’t expect was how many hours of videos and planning were absolutely necessary, I feel like I figured the more time I spent looking at that dark adobe window and deciphering what the tool bar tools even did the better I would continuously get at photo shop… but what I realized was that that relationship had an end point and it was after about the first 2 or 3 hours of practice… once I got a handle on the basics like general coloring and the ability to use the cutting tool I pretty much plateaued which wasn’t very fun, so that’s when I really started to rely on research and videos which I actually had a lot of in my prelim curriculum which was awesome. As I would be sitting in my room watching these tutorials I would see step by step examples of one thing becoming another and it still seemed like magic to me, I think I overestimated the power of technology in that I figured if I could use a mouse photoshop was supposed to make me an artist, the way crazy cool cameras on the I phones make everyone a photographer but I WAS WRONG.

The amount of artistic ability that I saw demonstrated by the various experts I watched videos of was incredible, even though it’s done using a mouse it is just another medium like a canvas is for a painter. But enough about how hard I realized photoshop was, because while I do have a new found respect for it I did get better and I intend to improve even further in the future so now to delve into some things I found very interesting throughout my learning experience. I think the idea of interpretation was exaggerated during this project, photoshop is all about altering how an audience interprets an image, but what really rang true was the fact that there are a million ways that one simple aspect of an image can be interpreted, at one point I took an animated picture of a dinosaur and just changed the background, I asked my roommates to tell me the vibe and with the same dinosaur I got all different responses depending on if the back ground was red or blue or light or dark, and then I went as far as to add a tiny eye eye brow furrow and the entirety of the picture was altered because now the once somewhat natural dino was angry decidedly so because of a 1 millimeter line moved slightly.

It’s almost scary to think how the smallest thing can make such a large difference, the power of photoshop is dangerous, which made me think about the insanity that is the culture of body retouching. Just reiterates that with great power comes great responsibility and I honestly don’t think our culture was ready for that responsibility when photoshop became so powerful. But that could be discussed at length and I only have 200 more words so I will press onward. To stray back to my passion that being to add whimsicality to reality, through experimenting with photoshop I realized the importance of then making that whimsicality more realistic. By that I mean how important subtleties that make something believable like shadowing, shading, color, and sizing relative to everything else are. I was confronted with the difference between the whimsicality of copying and pasting a cartoon fish in the sky of a real land scape and that even more amazing whimsicality of making the fish so realistic that the audience has to double take, I think success is achieved when the audience doubts the world for a millisecond before doubting the photo, that millisecond of wonder is worth all of the time and immense attention to detail necessary to achieve it. In closing this project not only made me respect the art of photoshop so much more, it also showed me the magical feats it can accomplish if utilized correctly, with that being said I am glad to have spent the 20 hours to go from a beginner… to beginner who now understands how much of a beginner they really still are.