Contact Sheet

This assignment was a lot of fun. I really liked being able to get creative with the photos that I chose and the various affects in Photoshop.

In the first row, I manipulated the resolution of an image. The butterfly was a colorful image with a lot of detail, and the change of resolution could be easily seen. To change the resolution, I clicked Image>Image Size, and selected different dpi for each cell. The image became more and more unfocused on the detail as I lessened the dpi. The end image of 72 dpi was the most unclear version of the image.

In Row 2, I worked with the color of the image. The image I chose was a pile of crayons because there are many colors in the picture that can be manipulated. The image I chose was already in RGB (web) mode so I had to change it to CMYK (print). The change from “Web mode” to “Print mode” made the colors in the image slightly darker and more concentrated. In the next square, I worked with duotone. I played around with the colors and ended up choosing PANTONE 811C solid coated as my final setting. I chose this because it was a nice shade of my favorite color orange, and it makes the picture look dark and mysterious in a way. Finally, I selected grayscale to change the photo to black and white, which I enjoyed because I like the look of a classic black and white photograph.

Row 3 had us experiment with the orientation of a landscape. I started off with a very symmetrical image, so I played around with different sections of the photo. The picture of the lake had a lot of detail in the front and foreground, and I wanted to focus on this detail with the cropping. First I cropped the image to a square by typing in 1 inch by 1 inch dimensions of the crop tool, and I chose to crop out the left half of the image. This took away from the symmetry of the image. For the portrait, I cropped part of the mountains in the background at a .75 inch width and 1 inch height.

I chose a portrait of the Eiffel Tower in my 4th row. This photo is significant because I fell in love with Paris after visiting it 3 years ago, and the Eiffel Tower is the most well known structure associated with the vibrant city. This photo is interesting because there is a lot of activity going on in the photo, but one might not realize it right away because the Eiffel Tower is so large and central in the picture. In this row, we were asked to start with an image, and gradually zoom in to a smaller detail in the photo. By the time I arrived at my final image, I chose to focus on 2 buses in the background behind the Eiffel Tower. I never would have noticed these buses unless I had cropped. To zoom in, the constraints I had to put on my image was 1 inch height by 1.332 inch width.

In Row 5, I began with a photo of a giraffe, and ended with an abstract image of the giraffe’s spots. I had to change my image size to 1 inch height by 1.5 inch width. From the original image, I cropped and zoomed further and further in until you could no longer identify the object that the image was of. I noticed when I was zooming further and further in that the image got very fuzzy at certain parts. I originally wanted to focus on the giraffe’s eyelashes in the final stages of the photo, but it was too blurry so I had to focus on something a little larger. The photo was 300 dpi, but still was not as clear as I would have liked it to be.

In the final row, I manipulated my senior portrait from high school. I put 1 inch x .721 inch constraints on the 300 rpi photo. It was really fun to play around in Photoshop with the filters and see how crazy I could make my face look. The first filter that I chose to use was the Rough Pastels under the Artistic filter. I played around with various stroke lengths and stroke detail. I found that the longer the stroke length I chose, the blurrier the image got. I also found that when I increased the stroke detail enough, it started to create white shaded spots on the image. At a stroke length of 13, a stroke detail of 2, and with a sandstone texture, this filter created a dreamlike feel. In the second manipulation of my face, I chose the “Liquify” tool. It was probably the coolest thing I did in this entire contact sheet. I chose to “liquify” everything around my face, but left my face intact so you can still tell what it is a picture of. In my final manipulation of this image, I chose to use the Photocopy effect in the “Sketch” filter. Like I mentioned earlier, I like the look of black and white photography, and this reminded me of that. I experimented with the detail and darkness levels, and finally arrived at a level 9 details, and a level 7 darkness.

Overall, this project was a lot of fun. It was very time consuming because I was unfamiliar with all the settings on Photoshop, but now I feel a little more comfortable with the program and now I possess basic skills to work with a photograph or image.