Assignment 5 - Overlay Rendering x 2

This week we have been learning how to render images and scenes in Sketchup and Photoshop to create effects and communicate the pictures in various ways. First we focused on one aspect of our studio project that we wanted to develop. My building has a big community floor dedicated to the studios, so I wanted to develop the circulation and make it a more realistic space. I started by modeling a version of it in sketchup:

Then I traced in some additions and improvements to make it look more realistic (people, studios, a skylight, a coffee bar and a library). Here are the additions in a sketchy, drawing style:

Then I added some shadows to make it a little more realistic:

Then came the color:

And finally I rendered it at night, after the library is closed:

The last step sent the image from Sketchup to Photoshop, where I played around with all of the layers on top of each other. I turned on and off different styles for the layers, and mixed up the opacity, which gave me this version, a little more of an abstract, artistic sample of the same scene:

Happy Birthday, pops!

My dad has had a passion for photography his entire life, so he's got thousands of old photos lying around that he's taken over the years. He's always wanted to go through them all to find the good ones and make digital scans to edit them in photoshop, restore their color and play around with their settings, but has never found the time. Over the break he found these photos that he took when he was my age, so I thought it would be nice to touch them up for his birthday. I brought out the colors, removed some scratches, and cropped out some old masking tape that had built up around the edges.

Happy Birthday, dad! Love you.

Assignment 4 - Photoshop tennis

After becoming masters of Google Sketchup over the past two weeks, we have moved onto photoshop. Each of us got paired up with a partner to play a game called 'photoshop tennis'. First, we took our sculptures from last week and put them onto a new background to give them some context. I took my courtyard and added a piece of it to a photo I took while in China in the summer of 2006:

[original photo]


[My 'serve' to Rachel]

Then we uploaded them onto the class fileserver for our assigned partner to play with. Rachel took my file and added some color to the cones and the windows of the skyscraper, a woman on her bike, and some transparency to the flags:

[Rachel's volley back to me]

Then i finished it off with another adjustment to change the scene once more. I took four pictures from online databases called everystockphoto.com and stock.XCHNG and used them to bring in a new foreground, a new sky, some fire and a new bike. These websites are great resources for finding free photos that you can use in your own work, with specific licensing agreements to each photo. If you click on the links you will find the authors of these photos and their original work. This was our final result:

[match point]