NEW MEDIA IN ART
Evolving Art @ Lawrence University
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Printing your 11x14
This can be done right in the print dialogue using similar tools but can be done more accurately in photoshop as follows;
1) Go to image (at the very top) > image size
2) Work with your longest dimension. Leave at least
a 1 inch margin on each side. This will be 14 inches wide after we resize the
canvas, so we’ll select 12 inches as the width. The height will automatically
resize. Set the resolution at 350 DPI. Click OK
3) Go to image > canvas size. Set the width at 14 inches and the height at 11. Leave the anchor in the middle. White is the most conventional extension color. Click OK
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Friday, February 14, 2025
Photo-quality Inkjet Printing in the Wriston Digital Lab
The Wriston digital lab is in the lower level of the Wriston art center, on the West side directly across from the photo area. Only the furthest in computer is connected to the printer. This video is chopped out of a longer covid-era video, so it's not the slickest production. There is also a printed version of these instructions in the lab.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Garagebandland
Three ways to use garageband;
Using MIDI technology (there are MIDI keyboards at every station in the 013 lab)...
Using pre-recorded loops...
Or multi-track recording...
Software instruments, loops, and multitrack recording...used individually or together. The possibilities are endless, especially when you consider that a project may start with a recording conveniently made with your phone. These how-to videos are all by...
https://thegaragebandguide.com
which has exhaustive and always up to date info on using garageband.
Monday, January 27, 2025
'Enhancing' Images
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Before |
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After |
This was something I put together for online learning. No longer great subject matter in this image but the enhancing tactics are still good!
You can view the official Photoshop tutorial in enhancement here. My approach is a little different in that it avoids controls with a lot of artificial intelligence (which gives you some artificial mistakes too) and adjustment layers, mostly because I tend to work with 50-100 megapixel files and have frequent crashing problems if I take that approach. Another reason is that it is just faster to work 'destructively' when you know what you want to do.
Here we have a 10 megapixel image made with an iPhone. The first thing I'm going to do here is open this up in Image>Adjustments>Curves
In the curves graph the mountain peaks represent where your tone is in this image (dark left, light right) and the line represents how you're going to pull/shift those around. The steeper you make the line the more contrast you're adding. Digital images seldom have a dead black, and from working in the darkroom we know we want some pure black to make the most of our tonal scale. By moving the very bottom of the line to the right we will make our darkest tones in the first peak dead black.
To shift tones around further we are going to split this image in two, as we need more highlight detail in sky area but we need to maintain bright whites in the poster. To do this we'll use the lasso tool, the third one down on the far left. With this tool you need to fill in a number in the feather box at the top to transition between these two sections. Here, it's a relatively small 15 pixels. Then we'll trace around the area we want to work on and then open curves again.
Here we want more happening in the highlights, so we'll pull our line down on the right side rather severely, and then add points to straighten it out in the midtones. The main reason to use curves rather than brightness/contrast here is that these sorts of radical manipulations often result in tonal stepping (looks like wood grain, but in the sky) when using slider controls.
Next we'll go to Select>Inverse to work on the rest of the picture, and open Curves again.
Here we want just a touch more contrast so we'll make an 'S' curve that steepens the slope through the mid-tones.
Next we'll address color saturation by going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation. There's a new control called 'Vibrance' that combines saturation with warming, but this image already shows too much color shift in that direction as we will see below.
Not sure about this final move. There is a charm to the casualness of the tilted perspective, yet as an illustration this is much easier to look at.
For a good explanation of camera settings look at this;
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Robert Frank's The Americans; The Most Influencial Photo Book of all time
The Classic Documentary on Robert Frank;
Sarah Greenough on The Americans;