Project 1

This first project involves three separate activities… two image edits and a sound edit. 

Image Edit A

I don’t have a lot of experience using PhotoShop on my own, but this activity allowed me to play around with some blur options and layering. For this first image edit, I used the Quick Draw tool to highlight one of the presidents on Mount Rushmore with the intention of making him stand out more than the others. After outlining the president, I then used the Invert option so everything except Jefferson’s face was selected, then chose the Field Blur at 10 pixels so the image was blurry but still recognizable as Mount Rushmore. I also created Jefferson’s face as a new layer so I could make it slightly larger than the original just to make him stand out a tad more. Finally, I created a blank box on which I could put both the original image and new image for a collage look rather than having both images uploaded separately.

Image Edit B

For the second image edit, I wanted to do some playing around with colors and transparency to focus attention on a certain part of the image. I also decided to try my hand at Google Drawings to make adjustments to the  image. Here is the original:

I wanted to highlight the layout of the notes in the image and focus attention on how the main ideas are organized in the margin of the paper and underlined. To make those stand out, I cropped three different copies of the original, adjusted each color to a teal tint, and increased the contrast by a smidge. I then added the original image in the background at 50% transparency. Finally, I added a text box and some arrows to try and tie everything together. Here is the result:

Sound Edit

For the sound edit activity, I used a free download called Audacity. I imported a free music download as well as a voice recording. On my voice recording, I was able to Normalize and Compress the audio to make it sound more fluid and even. The Silence Audio option also came in handy because when listening to myself talk I hear a lot of breathing and weird sounds that don’t belong. It took me a little while to figure out how to fade the music in and out, but I finally found the Envelope tool which was fun to use squeezing the sound waves up and down to make it the whole thing jive. At the very end I was able to Split the clip so I could apply a Fade Out because the envelope didn’t seem to squeeze the last bit down to nothing. Here’s my final result: