Final Project

           Before I started my final project I really didn’t have that many ideas. I’m not exactly sure how I came up with the big idea of the use of photo shop in the image industry, but once it came to mind I decided to just kind of run with it. I think my main inspiration was aesthetics of appearance class I took last spring. During the call the teacher slightly spoke about photo shop and showed us a YouTube video of a self taught photo shop artist. In the video she started with a plain bald picture of Penelope Cruz and with the use of photo shop she somehow miraculously gave Penelope a full head of flowing gorgeous hair. I thought this was really interesting but never thought I’d be able to try it since I’ve never really used photo shop in the past. I figured now would be a great opportunity to try it and see what I could do.

            At the beginning of my project I ran into many frustrations. Initially it took awhile to find several plain faces online. I wanted to use a random person so that way I wouldn’t be bias if I used a person that I knew. After I choose faces I started with makeup. I never realized how difficult it would be to make painted on makeup appear somewhat realistic. After a few trial and errors with each picture I think the makeup came out well. The other challenge with my pictures was the addition of hair. I used many online tutorials to guide me in making the hair look as real as possible but my hair never turned out as well as the examples online.

            After finishing all my images I was pretty satisfied given my amount of experience with photo shop. I never realized how difficult it was to make changes on photos to make them appear real. After doing this project I now understand while photo editors get paid so well because it is not an easy task to do. I really enjoyed during this project because I didn’t have any restrictions or guidelines and could do what I wanted. The freedom really allowed me to play around with the photos and get the images that I finished with. Looking back it was pretty difficult to get the images to where they are now and I’m pretty happy that I was able to make that much of change in the given amount of time. I’d like to learn how to make the changes in the photos even more realistic in the future. I think it’d be cool to be able to make changes almost unnoticeable. This project was kind of like baby steps in learning how to do so.