I know, I know, it looks like a sneaker commercial.

So first I took a photo that I didn’t really care for:

Less than compelling, I’m sure you’ll agree

So, I took this innocuous, thoroughly boring picture (although I kind of like that cloud?) and vintaged it up a bit.

The first thing I wanted to do was make it blurrier, so I went under FILTERS>GAUSSIAN BLUR, and set the coordinates to 15.0 and 15.0.

I’d upload a photo of what I got, except it looks almost identical to what is pictured above.

But these changes have cumulative effects.

Next, I wanted the colors to change a bit, get more intense and hazy, so I went under TOOLS>BRIGHTNESS-CONTRAST, and set the Brightness to -30 and the Contrast to +60. I didn’t know that those were the values I wanted, I used the slider to mess around with what it looked like until it got nice and hazy.

Here’s what I got.

So this would almost be enough, except that I really wanted to get the “vintage” feel going, and this is more of a bank commercial feel, maybe? Too insistent, too optimistic.

So, I decided to go black&white. To do that, I went under IMAGE>MODE>GRAYSCALE. After that, I just added the text in Helvetica. Here’s a shot of the tools that I used:

This graphic shows

• Grayscale mode (use it to change photos into b&w)
• The “Layers” dialog box (start paying attention to it)
• The text tool (the fat “A” in the long toolbar), which you use to add text
• The text box (where the text actually goes)

And, so, the final product, ready for commercial deployment. Voila.

Also, the quote on the photo? That’s a saying of Charles Baxter’s, “Art is not a sack race.” Words to live by.

See more examples of this assignment from the DS106 assignment bank.