Digital Art Variations on a Photograph: Changing the mood of an image using image adjustments and filters

This project is all about exploring ways in which you can reinterpret a photography visually by changing various characteristics and by applying various filters, or effects. You will be doing so with the purpose of changing the mood the photograph seems to suggest, creating a set of variations for the photo you use, each with a somewhat different emotional feel to it. To give you a sense of how photos can be re-interpreted, here’s a famous and very controversial set of magazine covers made at the time of OJ Simpson’s trial in The newsmagazines Time and Newsweek each used the same mugshot of OJ Simpson, but Time magazine used Photoshop to alter the photo quite dramatically, creating an image of Simpson that most people felt showed him as a very threatening figure. Here’s the plain mugshot (see below)

... and here are the two magazine covers that each used the mugshot:

Well before Photoshop came along, photographers often made prints from their negatives that were varied, sometimes simply to create more dramatic visual effects, rather than (as seems to have been the case with the Time magazine cover) to suggest a man’s guilt. The photographer Ansel Adams, famous for his landscapes, compared a photographic negative to the score of a piece of music, which a conductor (and orchestra) could interpret in very different ways – even though each performance would still present, essentially, the same composition. Adams printed some of his photos many dozens of times – even hundreds – over a span of decades. In general, his later prints often tended to be more dramatic, showing enhanced contrast between light and dark tones. The next slide presents several versions of the photo he is perhaps most famous for: Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. You’ll see how some features of the scene that are visible in certain prints become subdued, even invisible, in other prints.

The next few slides show some examples of works made by Digital Art students from in response to this assignment.

All three projects shown in the preceding three slides took, as their starting points, photos taken by the students themselves. You’ll be doing likewise, eventually. But as a warm-up, and to give you time and experience to explore what sorts of imagery might work best, you’ll be taking a photograph that you find through internet searching and then “borrow” (being sure to save the original unaltered jpeg, and also saving the URL through which you located the image) in order to alter and vary.

Two important considerations when searching for a suitable image are: -whether the image will lend itself to the creation of different moods -whether the image is of reasonable visual quality (in terms of file size and resolution, among other things) To address the first issue, you may wish to concentrate your search in the genres of landscape and portraiture, simply because such photos often have some emotional content and just seem to work better for this project. You are not restricted to these or any other genres (types) of photography, though. To address the second issue, take advantage of the feature, easily found in Google Image searches under “Tools” and “More,” that allows you to search by image size. Please do your best to find an image you like that is at least 600 x 400 pixels in size. (Bigger would be better!)

Once you find and save a possible image, go into Photoshop and open the image in that program. Do a File – Save As and save a copy of the image in Photoshop format (that’s.psd). Working with that new Photoshop file, you’ll want to make several copies of the original “background” layer. You can do so within the Layers palette simply by dragging the background layer to the “New Layer” icon near the bottom right corner of the Layers palette.

More advanced instructions will follow. But for now, simply explore various options for altering various copies (on different layers of your file) of the photo using Image – Adjustments. (You’ll find “Image” in your top menu bar: click and hold to then find “Adjustments.”) You may also wish to try out various Filters. The Filters menu can also be accessed via the top menu bar. You will also find it helpful to go to and open a file labeled “Selection tools image adjustments filter and quick mask.pdf.” You can find that file right under the link that brought you to this Powerpoint.