Hey, everyone. As you all know from my previous posts, I’ve had many issues with trying to find good material for my images. I’m still not incredibly happy with my hand-colored base (although I am happy with the actual painting I did. It was difficult to recreate that cabinet art, and I feel like I did a decent job on that.)
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results. I learned some more tricks of the trade, and as always, it’s important to know how to do these things for our future careers and manuscripts.
If that doesn’t work, https://anneladyem.org/image.html
This week, I have so far commented on Paul’s and Chris’s blogs.
[…] By anneladyem […]
Anne, your restoration work on the the Pac-Man game turned out fairly well, considering the newspaper quality of the original source. You made good use of the Photoshop filters and tools. By removing the dust and speckles, and darkening the faded area, the contrast really stands out. I would like to see how this image would look like with some color, just to add to its playful nature. Of course, you’d have to probably do some searching for what colors were used, just like you did for the Space Invaders image, which turned out pretty great.
I think the coloring in Space Invaders really makes the photo come alive. By coloring in the newspaper photo, it almost resembles an animation or comic book style of coloring, which sticks to the playful theme you have to your page. I might have kept the guy in the shot, just so the hands have some context, but with the poorly scanned newspaper image, I can see where you might have had some issues with the coloring.
Your work with the matted engraving image of the Capitol was nicely done. I like how you incorporated the color of your site into the background color of the engraving, allowing for a seamless transition from page to image. The result makes the image look more like an engraving, as the effect brings out more contrast of black and white of the Capitol, and also sharpens the building as well.
For the vignetted image example, I think removing the text was a good call, as it minimizes the advertisement look. You match the colors perfectly and the vignette also helps to cover up some of the advertising as well. However, the vignette also dampens some of the glow effect of the marquee lights, which isn’t a big deal since the focus is on Ms. Pac-Man. I might have chosen another image to vignette, but I know that you had mentioned that it was hard to find appropriate photos that match your topic. You might have already tried the Flickr Commons, but if not, there are some cool old computer pictures to be found. Not quite in the realm of video games, but maybe useful for something in your future work: https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=commons&q=computer
Overall, I think your work turned out to be well implemented and clearly shows your expertise in the matching colors, filters, and touch up tools. Great job!
These are really helpful comments! Thank you. Yeah, it’s tough to choose images for assignments like this, as most of my images are scanned newspapers or magazines. (Many of those in color, such as the Ms. Pac-Man ad!) I worked with what I had. I’m glad the choices I made made sense.
As you can see from the Space Invaders image, I actually did try and color the man as well. However, after spending time with the picture for a while, I felt very uncomfortable with doing that, especially with how poorly he scanned.
The Flickr commons is actually a very good idea for future use. Thanks.
I concur with April about the Space Invaders photo – the colors make the imagery on the game stand out in a good way and I can see you utilizing an image like this on a webpage about game history. The restoration of the Pac-Man image was pretty strong too, darkening the colors helped to differentiate between the figures and it’s a much clearer image with your improvements. The engraving also turned out very well. If you felt that some of the grey tones were lost (particularly on the building face, which lost a bit of detail) you can play with the curves to keep some of the mid-tones in there. I love the vignetted Ms. Pac-Man image – cleaning up the text and adding some drama to the edges really goes well with the overall feel of the photo!