We tend to surround ourselves with things that make us happy. Take a photo in your house or workplace and then find a creative way to make your favorite things about that space stand out. No limit to how many things you highlight, but make it interesting and intriguing.

(Visual Assignment These are a few of my favorite things) This method of editing has always been very interesting to me as we have a photo in my house of my sister playing softball. In the photo the ball was the only thing in color drawing the viewers attention to it and giving a very cool impact. (I will update when I can find the photo) When doing this visual assignment, I took a shelf in my room with thing that I’ve collected over the years, mainly knickknacks and books I liked, and pinpointed the things I liked the most with color. Each thing I highlighted has a story, from my love of dungeons and dragons, to my pride in being Canadian, to a couple really good memories from high school.

If you compare it to the original full color image, there is no rhyme or reason that shows the real value of anything. And while some of the things that are up there have a good story, they don’t reflect me right now, they reflect a past time and I keep them up for the memories.

I had to look up a tutorial myself to complete this assignment as I am so new to photo editing, but in the end once I understood the layering and what tools to use. I made two layers of the same photo, turned the top one black and white, then proceeded to erase the spots I wanted colored so that they showed through from the base image.

Take any picture in the entire world and change the color hue of the picture to completely change how it looks!

(Visual assignment Color Changer) Imagine you woke up one day and the sky was red. Not just a beautiful sunset but a deep unnatural red. Would that change the perception of colors? The ocean is only blue because of the sky, so would the water be red would the foliage seem greener in contrast with the flame of the sky? For this visual assignment, I used the idea of manipulating the colors to imagine what this would be like. A lot of this idea came from a comic I have read where people can’t see color so when the main character begins to see them, he gets overwhelmed with the changes in his sight, often leading to a breakdown. My idea was if a big part of your life changed, like the sky turning red, how would it effect you and the rest of the world? Would you see the world differently?

To create this photo I just messed with the colors, hue, saturation, and lightness in GIMP until I got my desired result.

First you take a video game cover. Then you make an honest title meaning what the game really is. Then you blot out the old title and put in your new title.

This visual assignment was the ‘Honest Game Cover’. I thought this was funny because often after buying games I look at them and really wonder why I thought I would like it. I chose this game because I noticed many brands are incorporating games into three in ones where it is now impossible to just buy one game. While this is nice as you get more content in one game, it also tends to draw away from the lower quality older games in the mix when the newer one is more functional and smoother to play. The cover image is also deceiving because it enhances the quality of the game above what it looks like when playing. When I first went to play this game set, I thought the remastering of the game was going to make it nice and new, instead I was left disappointed by the two older games. The reason I connected this to digital story telling is because I think there is a lot of deception in what you see. Just like the game cover being a shiny new image over a lesser quality product, often the curated stories people show online create the same idea. There is a perfect cover to hide the imperfections of the real story.

As for my process in this, I just used a blur tool to remove the original words and inserted text to manipulate the photo I took of the game case on my desk. I’m still barely getting the hang of photo manipulation so it could use some improvement.

Take a photo that manipulates distance to create an optical illusion. For example, I created an image of me holding the Washington Monument in my hand.

(Visual assignment optical illusion) The book Collapse by Jared Dimond is a story of overuse of resources and mishandling of the world leading to societal collapse. This image is to represent this as we as people are constantly overusing resources including ones for transportation. I was trying to use this image of the book collapsing over the car as an example of when it all comes crashing down if environmental and resource protections aren’t kept up.

To do this photo I tried to get an angle that made the books seem larger than they were without it being obvious I was holding them at that angle. The photo techniques were helpful in trying to come up with a solid way to angle this photo and I kept going back to the view of an ant.

Take a photograph of something (If you take a picture from the internet, make sure to be nice and cite the original) and transform it through GIMP, Photoshop, etc, into a drawing.

(Draw it Assignment) A bag of limes were deemed unworthy in a small roadside stand in North Carolina. All 8 of them were rejects but far from being useless. They had big dreams of going far like their hundreds of friends in the bucket. One wanted to be a pie, while another wanted to be in guacamole. But sadly the limes were deemed to ugly to go on their own. So they got rejected and sent away until one had a crazy plan, if they worked together they were worth more than just one pretty lime, that even if they were deemed ugly they still could be GOOD limes. They banded together and decided to promote themselves they were 8 ugly but good limes and they decided they liked it that way and put themselves on display. Because what’s better? One pretty lime, or 8 that may not look as nice but can to much more than one?

I edited this picture that was taken at a roadside stand in North Carolina to look like a canvas painting I always loved this photo and I really like the effect this added.

Here is my tutorial: