Finished
Early?
fire-breathing
she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's
tail
chi…me…ra
chi…me…ra
This
lab explores our ability, digitally, to bend the truth and alter
not only the appearance of images but the content as well.
Once
upon a time, photographic evidence might have been convincing in courts of
law but our digital abilities have now blurred the visual distinction
between fact and fiction.
chi…me…ra
is a humorous and entertaining stab at digital truthsaying.
an
imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts
an
illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially an unrealizable dream
Use
the BURN and DODGE tools to lighten or darken
selected areas, create shadows and highlights.
The
SPONGE tool adds or removes color intensity (saturation)
with the accuracy of a brush (rather than on the entire image).
Decide
on what sort of mix-and match you want to attempt. Put your head on a star's
body or switch faces on two friends' bodies.
Use
two scanned images, two high-resolution digital images or one of each. Be sure
your original images are high quality and that you save an original version
of each for your "before-and-after" presentation at the end of the
lab.
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3
The
following instructions are not intended to be "stand-alone".
Rather, they're just reminders and additions to classroom demos.
If you missed the demo(s) you'll need a little more support t
o
understand the tools.
4
Use
the PEN tool to create a PATH and select
the head, face or other body part you want to copy and paste.
Once
you've pasted, EDIT>TRANSFORM, hold the
<shift> key down and drag the corner to re-size your paste.
TRANSFORM
will also allow you to rotate the paste and give you a convincing angle.
Read
through the photoshop tricks below to prime you for the technical work. Your
goal is to make your chimera completely convincing.
1
Work
next on matching hue (color), saturation (amount
of color), brightness and contrast.
Find
pictures of people/celebrities you wish to experiment with. Please use scans
or a high resolution digital images. No crappy web images.
Your base images should look good at 100%...400x800 pixels.
Finally
you'll have to BLUR the edges between your paste and the background
image (so that it doesn't look sharply pasted and crude).
First,
though, you'll need to MERGE the two layers you're blending
together.
Turn
off all the other layers and MERGE VISIBLE
to combine the layers you're going to blend between.
Now
(finally) you can blend with the BLUR and SMUDGE
tools. Be sure to lower the PRESSURE first so you make the
effects subtle.
Do
a second chimera but this time create an entire scene. transfer
a whole person from one environment to another.
These
look particularly impressive if you change scale and make
the pasted figure huge (like a giant) or tiny
(talking to a mouse).
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