The prompt

Here we have the unedited and then edited photos of my bed, which change the mood. The unedited one is normal looking, somewhat inviting on a cold, rainy day like this but nothing special. The edited one I wanted to make more magical. I used the editing tools on my phone to up the exposure, brilliance, highlights, shadows, brightness, saturation, vibrance, noise reduction, and warmth while decreasing the black point and contrast. I also added a strong white vignette to the edge. The result was more magical, but it also gives me a World War II era old-timey feel. I think that might just be my floral bedspread and the crocheted blanket my grandma made for me, though.

Forests can sometimes have a dreamlike quality to them, but what if you could make one more dreamlike?

Sometimes walking in a forest can feel like this-

Even if in reality the forest looks like this-

Feeling as if you have stumbled into a fantastical world is part of the joy of walking through the woods. They have a habit of shifting and never looking the same twice. The edits I made to the original photo show how magical and mysterious the woods can seem and may help people recall how wondrous it can be to trek through the woods.

For my first assignment from the assignment bank, I chose Switch up the Mood. I selected it because it is enjoyable to play around with photos and see what you can do with them. Still, I have never really sat down and played with all the various ways my phone allowed me to edit photos. For example, until this assignment, I had never changed the noise reduction or the black point on one of my photos. In the future, I hope to explore photo editing even more.

I started with the second picture featured above. It’s of the forested area you pass going on one of the little bridges at UMW. I already thought it looked rather pretty and whimsical, but I figured I could make it more so. To edit the image, I used the editing software that comes with the photo app that is pre-downloaded on my iPhone. Then I used the Dramatic Cool filter. I lowered the exposure, brilliance, contrast, warmth, and tint while raising the highlights, shadows, brightness, black point, saturation, vibrance, noise reduction, and vignette. I thought the edits I did gave the woods a much more dreamlike quality since there was more color and the edges were more blurred. I also thought the blurred edges made it look more like it could be something out of a painting, relating it back to our class theme, The Joy of Painting.

For this assignment, I found it relatively easy as on this day it was a quite typical gloomy Winter day. I also happened to snap a photo of the day outside due to a photoblitz assignment. With adobe lightroom, I transformed my gloomy day into a brighter fall day by using the saturation, temperature and exposure functions. The mood went from a winter day, to fall. 

(I once again had technical difficulties with uploading these photos, so I decided to post these photos on twitter so my followers can also view this assignment)

For my last assignment of the week, I’m choosing the two star assignment, “Switch Up the Mood” It will finish the week off for me with 12.5 stars!

Here’s the photo I started with. It’s a picture of my dad and I playing a paddle game on the beach a few years ago. I wanted to see if it was possible for me to change up the image so it looked like a different time of day.

Here’s what I came up with. I shifted to make the blacks and the shadows of the photo while also adjusting the contrast. The end product looks more like twilight or a night with a bright moon than the original sunset photo. Another tool I implemented was to lower the “temperature” of the photo and introduce cool colors to signify the lack of daylight. Realistically, if you took an image at twilight, you wouldn’t be able to see the figures in the photo well either, so my edit turned out true in that way. I used Pixlr.com again to edit this photo! I definitely think the mood of the photo changed by darkening it significantly.

For my last assignment, I chose a two star photo editing assignment that said we needed to switch up the mood of a picture. For this assignment I used a free photo editing software to adjust certain aspect of the first image to change the mood. I played with contrast, saturation, warmth, shadows, and more. I really struggled with the editing software as I have never really used one before this week. All of the editing I have done prior could be done with an app on my phone so it was never necessary. This was definitely the hardest assignment for me this week, however, I am very happy with my end result.

This is the view I had in my old apartment from my screened in porch. The view was amazing, but the screen on the porch would make it difficult for the colors to come out the way I wanted them to and they often weren’t as bright. So my goal was to bring the picture to the glory of the actual scenery. The sunsets were vibrant with bright colors and always made me happy, while my pictures usually come out dull. I feel that my edited picture portrayed that happier mood and made the picture itself a truer match the sunsets I saw from that porch.

For this visual assignment you had to use Photoshop to change the hue, saturation, lighting, and contrast to edit/change a photo’s feel. I used a photo I had taken over the summer of a dock in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Before:

After:

I played around with the photo in Photoshop trying to make the overall photo darker. I used the burn tool for the water and in between the trees to keep the rest of the photo from dimming and also to keep the green more vibrant.

Assignment may be found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/switch-up-the-mood/

At times, Sterling’s life seems bright and filled with opportunity until a depressing moment appears and places new obstacles in the road ahead, feeling cold and bitter.