Q4 Image Editing

The creation of my media and design project was an image edit. I titled it, “Dogs in Spring”. The basic premise of my edit are dogs in a beautiful cherry blossom photo.  All images are not mine, but are copyright free. The goal that I was trying to achieve in this project is to make something that I could use as my desktop and something that would be fun to look at and would make people go, (“wow that’s hella cute!”)  I also wanted to brush up my skills on image editing using the program pixlr.

When making this project, I first had to come up with what I wanted to accomplish and what pictures would be appropriate to add towards my goal. I went on a copyfree website and found a beautiful cherry blossom scenery picture that I would then use as my background. I also found someone’s dog and I scooped that picture. I then uploaded both pictures on pixlr. To combine the pictures into one, I cropped out the dog from its original photo using the lasso tool and paste it on my blossom background. At first, I didn’t know if I wanted the dog to be just in the background or up close in your face. I decided to put the dog up close because it adds that extra emphasis that I was aiming for.  I then blurred the outline of the dog to make it seem more nature in the picture. After this, I thought that something else was missing and I decided to add another dog to my edit. I chose to put the dog more in the background and ideally have him chilling in the shade. This gives the edit some contrast because the dogs are at different proportions from each other. To make it more realistic, I used the brush tool and at 17 opacity added some shadow on the dog to make it look like he was actually under the trees and in the shade.

I didn’t really have a hard time because creating my edit because I already had some basic knowledge on how to work the editing program pixlr. However, one thing that did trouble me was cropping an object out of one picture and pasting it on another. This was hard since sometimes I would crop too much out and it didn’t look quite right. Since this project, I feel that I have gotten better at cropping images out because I figured out that instead of drawing with the lasso tool, you can actually just do multiple clicks when outlining the image you’re cropping out. Overall, I learned that you have to be patience when image editing. Editing a picture is not something that you can rush and get done right away. Also be able to share your edit to people to get feedback. Even after the peer review, I also went out to other people to figure out ways to improve or add to my edit.

If I had a chance to do this project all over again. I feel that I would do the same thing

because I enjoy how my image edit turned out. For those who want to pursue this project, keep in mind that you’ll be getting frustrated a lot because sometimes a tool doesn’t apply to your edit, or a tool won’t work altogether. However, I feel that if I used any other tool besides pixlr, it would be even more difficult, such as photoshop, because I have no clue how to work photoshop. Finally, I want to do more edits that I can send to my friends.

Images used:

Dumat, Maja. Flickr: Shiba Inu Kazumi, 29 Sept. 2012, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Shiba_Inu_head.jpg#/media/File:A_Shiba_Inu_head.jpg+.

Tawashi2006. Tawashi2006, 28 Mar. 2002, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cherry_blossoms_at_Miyagawa-Tsutsumi02.jpg#/media/File:Cherry_blossoms_at_Miyagawa-Tsutsumi02.jpg+.