1. I wanted to create an image that the audience would remember distinctly in their heads. I wanted to create a mysterious yet old-fashioned look to my header. The reason I tried to make it look retro was because I think that people have read less books in our current era, and I wanted to add a nostalgic ambience to this image as if they were looking at a distant past. In addition, I wanted it to look mysterious by adding a green and red filter so my audience may be curious by what lies within my website. I want the audience to see books from my point of view, as a source of nostalgia, mystery, and wonder. In addition, I noticed that both images were a little symmetrical so I split both images in half so it looked like the two images had merged into one. I did that because I wanted to convey this message: the deeper you wade into this website, the more mysterious and fantastical will my posts become. So that is why I did not blur the left side and only the right side of my new image.
2. I found my images on Flickr. I know that I can use the images because they have the Creative Commons license and therefore I have the freedom to redistribute it and edit it to my liking only if I reference the original author, give a link to the license, and let the readers know if I made any changes.
3.I used the cutout function to create a rectangle out of the lincoln inn library picture. I used the effect function to turn the library picture red and the used book store picture green. I used the liquify tool ‘Push’ to create the swirl effect on the red portion of the picture. The reason why I chose green and red is because they are opposite colors, so I thought that there may be symbolism in having two opposite types of book location covered in opposite hues. Then, on the WordPress special effect feature, I used the orange color effect to give the overall picture an orangish tint. In Lee Manovich’s “Inside Photoshop,” Manovich explores the different types of functions that can be used in Photoshop. Manovich states, “While some of these filters can be directly traced to previous physical and mechanical media such as oil painting, others make a reference to actions or phenomena in the physical world that at first appear to have nothing to do with media”(Manovich). Likewise, I experienced both types of filters. The cut-out and color filters both have backgrounds to the physical arts. However, the Push effect was a “phenomena in the physical world” that allowed me to distort parts of the image into a blurry swirl. In addition, Manovich says, “As we saw with the wave filter, the same algorithm can generate an abstract image or a realistic one” (Manovich). In my case, I used the filter to try to distort reality minimally enough that it looked neither realistic nor abstract, but a strange culmination of both.
4) A defining feature of painting programs was the tools (Davison 208). My experience using Pixlr was similar to using a bitmap. First of all, as Davison states, “ [Windows Paint] included… ‘shape’ tools that allowed the user to click and drag to create rectangles, circles, and triangles” (Davison, 280). Similarly, I used a shape tool in production of my image, although it was for different purposes. Davison describes using the shape tool to create outlines of shapes. However, the shape tools I used were different as they cropped the picture I had selected into a shape that I chose, a rectangle. In addition, Davision states, “A bitmap is a two-dimensional presentation of the bits in a computer’s memory. These bits could either be ‘on’ or ‘off’ and when these states were then rendered as black and white, respectively, the bitmap produced a visible image’ (Davison 278). When I used certain paint features in Pixlr, such as Blur or Push, I experienced the ‘on’ effect as I could change the looks of the pixels by sliding over the image with my cursor. However, I did not experience the ‘off’ effect as it did not revert back to its original state when I rubbed the same spot with my cursor. I had to use the undo function. In conclusion, there are similarities such as similar tools and the ‘on’ effect, but there are also differences such as having different functions for those tools and no ‘off’ effect.
References
Davison, Patrick. “Because of the Pixels: On the History, Form, and Influence of MS Paint.” [PDF link]
Manovich, Lev. “Inside Photoshop” Computational Culture. [PDF link]
Bookiepop 