3 Color Correction's

Karabagh Mountains Before: This past summer my family and I went to Armenia, and Karabagh. During our two week stay it was very muggy and foggy out, especially as we drove up and down the roads that went up and down various mountains.

Karabagh Mountains After: To correct the color of this image and display the beauty of the mountains I first used the sharpen tool to highlight the mountains, and the grass in the forefront of the picture. I played around a lot with the sharpen tool so as not to sharpen the picture too much. I then used the brightness tool to bring brighten the picture further bringing out the features of the mountains. 

Sassounsi Tavit Before: This is a statue of the warrior Sassounsi Tavit on his horse in Armenia.

Sassounsi Tavit is thought to be a mythological hero in one of many Armenian folk epic poems.

Sassounsi Tavit After: In order to color correct this photo I didn't do much. Most of what I did had to do with adjusting the brightness and sharpening the image to highlight the statue and make it more prominent in the photo. By adjusting the brightness the fogginess of the picture disappears making the sky and the sun shining clearer. By sharpening the image I was able to make the statue appear more majestic and more prominent in the picture.

Sosi Morkoor and I Before: This is a photo of me and my aunt Sosi on New Year's Eve. As you can see this photo is kind of dark and faded.

Sosi Morkoor and I After: As I mentioned above, this photo was very dark and faded so in order to brighten it I used the brighten tool, which brought out the color of our faces as well as our surroundings. I then used the sharpen tool to help correct the color of our faces.

2 Composition's:

The first composition is supposed to be symbolic, showing a soldier going away to war in the dead of winter, fading away if you will, and his wife/girlfriend unable to let him go. This could symbolize the last memory she has of her husband/boyfriend or how much she misses him or even the fact that he has gone (died) and the memories she has of him have faded away into nothingness because without seeing him or hearing from him memories can fade. In order to compose this picture I first chose to use this picture of a park, and then selected the man and woman from a photo I found online. I then copied and pasted it into the picture of the park twice, positioning them to look like they were slowly fading away, making the second copy faded added to this effect. The biggest issue with this composition was the color. I tried to match the color of the park with the color of the couple, but did not do a very good job of making them similar.

The second composition is more simple, it is just of two bear cubs play fighting in the grass in front of a church. I thought this would be appropriate because this church is in such a place that it is the only thing besides grass, rocks and trees. Bear cubs being curious could have wandered upon it and started some kind of quarrel while there over a berry one might have found. In order to input the bears into the photo I selected them from the original image they were in and copied and pasted them into the image of the church, which I took. After pasting it, I had to delete some parts of the bears by selecting them and fading the edged of the bears to make it look more realistic.

3 Composite Picture's:

 This photo was originally only of flowers in a vase on a table with white tablecloth. To make it a composite photo I used the lasso tool and to crop out a flower from another image and part of a strawberry from another image. I copied and pasted these into the image with the flowers in a vase and then played around with them, moving them from place to place in order to make the image abstract. Each image had it's own layer, making it easy to move them around and erase parts of them if I needed to.

 

This image was originally only of the wind chimes with the tiny bird feeders. I used the select tool to select parts of other pictures which I then edited and cropped parts out of in order to input them into the base image. After inputting them into the base image I again moved them around to create the image of a person smelling growing flowers, blueberries growing in the distance with bird feeders happily waiting for the birds to come. This image was pretty simple to create in that I only had to select three parts of three other images in order to make an abstract composite, photo.

This photo was originally a picture of a cheesecake with different flavors. I have added a picture of a cupcake, strawberries and a kiwi to make it a composite picture. I think I did a really good job with this final composite picture because you can't tell where the cheesecake ends and the cupcakes, kiwi or strawberries begin. I intentionally chose these various foods to add onto the cheesecake because they are very bright and help to make the picture very eye catching. Again, I simply used the select tool and the lasso tool to select the part of the cupcakes I wanted from the photo, the part of the strawberries I wanted from that single photo and lastly the one kiwi I wanted from that photo and copied and pasted them into the photo of the cheesecake, playing around to see which space they would look best in. To finish this composite, I played around with the layering, putting the kiwi on top of the strawberries and the cupcakes on top of the kiwi to make it look like they were somehow melded into each other.  

First 3 Abstract Photographs:

 

  This picture was taken at Rockefeller center Christmas day. After uploading it onto the computers in the mac lab I played with the colors on photoshop to make the colors brighter as well as our faces, however I was having some trouble with it, so instead I played with the saturation of the photo on my computer in the photo-viewer and the picture that originally looked dark and grey-ish became this. The buildings look like they're popping out, our faces are illuminated and the tree is the center of attention.

This picture was taken during a sunset on one of the many days of winter break. We were driving into the city to see my aunt and uncle when after crossing the George Washington Bridge I noticed that the sky was a bright orange color, making the rest of the scenery a dark blue/black color. The bright orange illuminated the town of Edgewater and the clouds look like they're fanning up, out and away. To me it seemed like an abstract photo because the sky extended into town and is rarely such a color. I haven't tampered with this photo at all. It is as I took it.

This final photo was taken by my best friend who is very much into taking photos and playing around with them to give them cool effects to make them cooler than they originally were. She took this picture several times, changing the effects of her camera to various settings many times. There are many versions of this picture, however in the one above picture she used an HD (I believe that's what it's called) setting to make the colors fade and instead have the picture come out in black and white, exaggerating the outlines of my hair, face, eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and shirt as well as the wall in the background.

First 3 Abstract Paintings/Drawings:

 60 Minutes:

This last image that I created on photoshop took me the most amount of time because it was allowed to be whatever I wanted it to be and not being very artistic I didn't really know what to draw. I started by making the entire canvas a light purple because that is my favorite color. Next I began playing with all the different kinds of brushes and textures they make, creating these bubble-like images which could symbolize random thoughts, wishes, desires of people. I wanted these bubbles to pop out of the painting so I chose bold colors that would attract attention.Once I had drawn these bubbles, I decided to fill them in with colors that again would pop out of the picture, giving the largest bubble outlined in a dark purple multiple colors. Before finishing my painting I felt that it was missing some thing so I added some random dots inside the yellow and orange of the largest bubble as well as some random pink squiggles towards the bottom of the painting. Once I had done this, I felt that my painting was finished.

45 Minutes: 

This painting was more difficult than the self portrait to construct because we had to paint a landscape and I wanted to create the image of mountains after mountains, but not in close proximity. The difficulty stemmed from creating the image of "far-away" distance-wise. I could not figure out how to draw the mountains to make them look like they were far away, so I settled for making the mountains look like they were appearing one after another, instead of far apart. I chose the colors before I drew the outline of the mountains themselves, deciding to make the outline of the mountains blue so it would be obvious where they started. I decided to make the mountains in the forefront a dark blue color to show that they were taller than the mountains that I drew behind them. Then I added some white at the peaks of the mountains to further emphasize that they were taller and therefore colder. The green mountains are colored green to show that they aren't as tall and therefore not as cold. Behind these green mountains there are three other colors, a lighter green, light blue and a purple color. The green symbolizes another mountain, the blue is for the sky and the purple is for rocks that might appear in between mountains.

15 Minutes:

This was my first attempt at using photoshop to create anything. Being that we had to draw a self-portrait using the paint tools I didn't really know how to go about drawing my self-portrait. After playing around with photoshop and all of the various tools, I figured out how to create a perfect circle as well as ovals to make my head and eyes. I then used the paintbrush to draw a nose, eyebrows, and a mouth. Then, playing with the different kinds of brushes I found a thicker more feathery brush to draw in my hair. Next, I added various colors to my hair, eyes and mouth to make it look more realistic. The pink on my cheeks was one of my final additions using a round faded brush. Finally, I added the colors red, blue and yellow around my head, emphasizing some of the various emotions that help to characterize me as a person such as yellow for happiness, red for angry, and blue for melancholy.

About Me:

Hi, my name is Tamar Samuelian. I am majoring in Early Childhood Education and English with a minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at The College of New Jersey. Upon coming to TCNJ, I was a biology major, however after taking intro to biology I found that it was not for me and decided to take a different path, Education. This being my fourth year here, I have found that the college makes everything ten times more difficult than it has to be, playing ring around the rosie with me for these past three years, not allowing me to take more than four classes or even the classes I need to take in order to graduate. It seems I will never leave. Taking intro to digital media was a very large risk for me because I do not know the slightest thing about digital media. I am enjoying it so far though, and hope to learn a lot of new things which I will be able to use when I become a teacher. Besides my interest in teaching, I love watching funny movies, trying different foods, going to the beach, hanging out with friends, playing basketball and most of all baking yummy treats.