Photoshop and Presidents

J. Knoll, one of the creators of Adobe Photoshop, said that his software gave people a voice "they would not have had before"[p.2]. Photoshop became a really democratic tool. You have a great possibility of creating any political images of your choice. Corrie Pikul in his article "The Photoshopping of the President" points that our current president is the most popular Photoshopped subject. And it is so easy - to take any image, crop any head from his body, place it on a new body - and "the results are more lifelike, than ever before"! Is not that great? You have probably seen these funny gallery images. They are everywhere now. What is more - people love these images. And once they have become popular, audience completely forgets about the source of the images, the original author. It is not important now.

Photoshop breaks the borders; people can now talk more comfortable about politics in a new way. There are many hundreds of web sites about Photoshopped images. People create a new image with a new meaning as a combination of other unrelated images (is not it the idea about collage from A.Kerne's article "Using Composition to Re-Present Personal Collections of Hypersigns" that we were discussing last week?!). As you can see, Photoshop is a really great tool for anybody to create whatever he wants.

The number of people who use Photoshop to express their political views is increasing. And our second assignment helped this a little bit. I liked the idea of showing politicians in a new way. And Photoshop is really great for it. As a topic I showed two powerful figures in today's political world - American and Russian presidents. Bush and Putin meet each other to discuss political problems. So, it is not so rare to see them together. In order to create the new images, I took my own images taken by myself in St.-Petersburg (they served as a background). Plus I downloaded the images of the presidents from here.

The first image shows one day from the president's life. The original image was taken by me in the Museum of History in St.-Petersburg, Russia. I cropped the faces of Putin and Bush and placed them on the image. I used clone stamp tool and eraser tool to correct some places so the heads could fit better. I also used image adjustments to change several colors. I like the idea of showing famous people in a new and unusual way. This is what I tried to do with my image using Photoshop techniques.

Have you ever dreamed in your life about taking autographs or pictures of famous people? I was trying to show this idea in my second image - hunting for the pictures. I showed a picture of my brother, waiting for the presidents to come closer and take their pictures. I applied artistic filter to a background and several effects (such as shadows and glow) to the layers. I also used clone stamp tool (I really enjoy using it) to clear some places so there is no extra stuff on the president's red carpet.
As a result you can see both images on my second web page.
So, Photoshop is a really powerful tool for expressing your ideas. And these images can prove it.

For creating my second web page I used new software for me - Dreamweaver 2004MX. At first it seemed difficult to use it. But after working on my web page I discovered a lot of useful features which make the process of creating a page faster. Dreamweaver MX is a user-friendly program which saves your time in writing a code (comparing with HTML-Kit).

References
1. Corrie Pikul "The Photoshopping of the President"

Photoshop Collage

The discovery of collage is one of the biggest achievements that helped to increase the artists' and designers' capabilities. Collage helps to combine other different images and ideas not connected between each other in one unique feature. If you are interested in this amazing topic, please visit some sites about collages:
collage-portfolio of Claudine Hellmuth; collages from Lithuania (I spent several years in this country. That is why it was interesting for me to explore this site); collages Cy de Groat; one more good site.

I developed my first web page and placed a collage image created in Adobe Photoshop there. As a theme I chose the images from St.-Petersburg, Russia and tried to combine real and imagined. St.-Petersburg is a really wonderful city. There are so many places of interest that you can spend your whole life visiting and discovering them. St.-Petersburg is one of the biggest cultural cities in the world. One of the nicknames of St.-Petersburg is "The Venice of the North"(referring to St. Petersburg's numerous rivers and canals). And can you believe the fact that the city has the largest number of bridges in the entire world?! If you try Google images you will be really surprised how beautiful all the bridges are! So, I tried to show some images of bridges combined with other images of the city. I used two digital pictures that were taken last year by my brother. I also scanned one postcard with the Trotsky Bridge. The rest of the images were taken from St.-Petersburg.com

As a result I had 12 layers and several text layers in Photoshop.
Working on my collage image I discovered a plenty of new features and tools in Photoshop. I tried selecting objects using Rectangular, Elliptical Manquee and Polygonal Lasso tools. I also used Magic Wand tool which allows you to select a consistently colored area (for example, a blue sky) without placing a line around its outline. You can specify the color range, or tolerance, for the Magic Wand tool's selection. While selecting I used feather command. It softens, smoothes or blurs the border of a selection. So the changes you make blend in better or naturally with its surroundings. You can correct the width of the feathered edge by entering different values from 0 to 250 pixels. I applied different layer styles (inner shadow, outer and inner glow, bevel and emboss and others). I experimented in using filters. As a result I used some artistic variations on several images. I also used a new tool for me - Liquify tool. It works as a brush, which allows you to apply different effects to the selected image. I placed some names of the bridges on my image. I used several fonts such as Zapf Chance, Unicorn, FuturaLight and others. You can also apply different effects to the text properties (the same as to the layers). You can place the text not only horizontally, but also along an arc, in a form of flag, wave and in other variations.

I created a collage image that combines real and imagined objects. Many famous artists (Braque, Picasso, Tzara and L. Aragon) produced so called collages. Collage is more than only selecting, cutting and pasting. You can get a new meaning to your work. Collage recombines found objects. A good example of a found object is the work of Marcel Duchamp "Fountain". He showed that "the context of found objects and their relationships to each other play a key role in their meaning" [1]. Collage can be created from images, web pages and even sounds (music).

A.Kerne in his article "Using Composition to Re-Present Personal Collections of Hypersigns" explains how CollageMachine ("tool for using composition to represent personal collections of hypersigns") works. He explains how to create a composition using different tools from the toolbar. I really enjoyed playing with the images using his site. A.Kerne believes that creating a collage brings a new meaning to the new object.

R.Pyke's article Digital Images and Photojournalism was published in PSA Journal, July 1998 [2]. Though it is not quite modern, the ideas and problems that he raises are very actual. R. Pyke writes about Adobe Photoshop as software used to create new images "limited by the operator's imagination". He criticizes images that do not show the truth because it is difficult to analyze whether such images are real or they were created in Photoshop. And I agree with him. A person should know the truth about what he sees. R. Pyke's understanding of using Photoshop is different from what A.Kerne thinks. While creating my image I tried to show some places in the city for everybody to understand what they really are.

References
1. Adruid Kerne Collage Machine: An Interactive Agent of Web Recombination Leonardo, Vol33, No.5, 2000
2. Ralph E. Pyke Digital Images and Photojournalism PSA Journal; Jul98,Vol.64 Issue 7

Some facts about Photoshop

I think everybody should know at least something about Photoshop. This is a very powerful program that allows you to perform different tasks with images.

I used to work with a limited set of features in Photoshop. Of course, I want (and already started) to expand my knowledge and increase my efficiency using it. In this class I think we will be using Photoshop a lot for web design.

So far in the class we learned how to change your image resolution, how to work with Rectangular Marquee Tool, Lasso Tool, how to save information in different ways; we played with images using Transform option and filter effects. As a result a new image was created by everybody.

I also want to say that I read a lot of interesting and new information about graphics from Web Style Guide (http://www.webstyleguide.com/graphics/index.html). The chapter Graphics tells us about characteristics of web graphics and graphic file formats (gif, jpeg and png formats).

Why blogging?

What is blogging? Is it useful or not? Why do thousands of people go online and post their thoughts so that everyone can read them later? These and many other questions were very interesting for me to explore.

It was August, 2004 when I first heard about http://www.livejournal.com/. At that time I did not know that this meant blogging. My friends recommended me that site to post my impressions about a new country I was going to visit. But I preferred a usual way of communication - e-mails, phone calls.

For the last two weeks the question about blogging became very interesting for me. I discovered a new word for myself and began reading articles about blogging. And I found how extremely popular blogging is!

A lot of good words have been said about blogs, I am not going to repeat them. I will just mention that blogs can be useful and give you even more information that you can find somewhere else. They can also save your time finding this information. Of course, there are disadvantages of blogs. But for ISP523 class keeping a blog will be very useful. I will try to maintain my blog according all the requirements for our class.

This is my blog!

It's cool! And I like it.