Photoshop

Working with photoshop has been a smoother ride than I anticipated (smoother for me than working with fonts in dreamweaver at least!) Is it just me or is photoshop extremely similar to Macintosh's dinosaur kid program "kid pix." (I've yet to find someone who gets this reference so if you do please comment!) Regardless, I'm finding the best practice to be pulling my sleeves up and learning through experience. For example, I could have someone explain to me the concept of layers a thousand times but until I made the quick mistake of not saving a layer I could not wrap my head around their importance. 

Here are my brags and bemoans: I still, as hard as I truly try, cannot convince myself that editing these photos do the works of art justice. Now, I also believe that this means that MY edits do not do the works justice but I'm working on that aspect. And, as I'm learning, I am becoming more inventive with the WAY I edit to enhance the message. For example, when cropping and resizing an image of a Dionysian sarcophagus  I attempted to include the entire frieze. Once I put it next to the original it looked like a mediocre photograph from a text book as opposed to an ornate professional image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website. This left me somewhat disheartened until I realized, eureka! Why don't I just crop one scene from the sarcophagus, IE Dionysus on his panther. This helped and it added to the dynamic of the image and my message so I do plan on using this tool in my final project. 

I also appreciate the ability to restore a photo. I took a horrible image of a fantastic sarcophagus at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples a few years ago and after playing around with this in photoshop I was able to bring out the figural definitions and sharpen the edges so that the image appeared much clearer. 

I've also been playing around with coloring. Now, coloring has NEVER been a strong suit of mine but I'm working on exercising control and muscle in my fingers to perfect this because I think it will be extremely useful for my final project. The image I used was intricate and I could have made this easier on myself but I figured why not dive into the deep end.  Now this is something I do NOT have a problem with as it serves as an example for what the sarcophagi looked like after production. I'd like to make the colors more vibrant, but I find when I do this it takes away from the shape of the figures and quality of the monument. 

So in conclusion, I am working with a subject near and dear to my heart which could be my achilles heal. Every time I make a change I think to myself "that dosn't look at good as the original." BUT, this also deepends on the image I am working with. I do believe photoshop will serve me quite well in restoring MY photographs of sarcophagi (of which are the majority) but when working with a professional museum image it is hard to compete. 

Comments

[Amber]

I can totally see what you mean. For my page, many of the museums I'm working with have given me images to use and they are contemporary institutions so, I feel like there is not too much to do to improve them. For MY images, like old family photos, it is very helpful. But even brightening and balancing the levels does seem to help any image. Or even cropping it to show just what you want it to is also important. Can't wait to see your finished project!