TPI - Assignment 5

Sunglasses - I was struggling with this assignment at the start and it took me a while to realise what the problem was.  Then just by coincidence I happened to buy a new pair of sunglasses.  While driving home from the shops with the new sunglasses on I was amazed at how much greener the grass was and how much bluer the sky was.  The sunglasses have a orange tint and this was making my view of the world look completely different.  I particularly liked the way the clouds were more prominent and that I could see more detail whereas without the glasses there was no real detail visible.  Just for clarification, this assignment is all about Light & Colour.

This sunglasses moment sort of kick started the assignment off for me and I then set about re-reading the assignment several times over.  There were also books recommended in the assignment which I have since bought.

So having got the enthusiasm back I set about taking some shots to use for the assignment.  This was when things started to go down hill again.  Although I had some images to play with I was not 100% happy with them but I'll blame that on the weather and the small windows of opportunity I had to get out and shoot.  In fact, the next hurdle was to do with technology not taking pictures.  The objective was to utilise channel mixing to produce a monochrome image.  This is difficult when your software does not have that feature.

Gimp - Having read through some course documentation for help I found I was faced with 2 choices,  1. Purchase Photoshop CS4  or 2. Download the Gimp for free.  You guessed it, with Gimp installed I started to play with the channel mixer and managed to get some fairly good results.  Channel mixing can be quite difficult and I tried it on a lot of images to try and get a better understanding about how the Red, Green and Blue channels affect an image when they are manipulated.  This was all well and good but I was still not at the point where I felt I had a good enough image to upload and write about.

CS5 - After all the fretting over this assignment I was rescued by Adobe.  Just by coincidence they launched CS5 and there was a free 30 day trial on offer.  Without hesitation I downloaded the trial and re-visited most of my images so I could use a real channel mixer on them.  The difference was amazing, the application is so good it's untrue.  I was able to process my final image, write up my findings and I got 9/10 for my efforts.

There's more - I also found out through this great group on flickr that as a student with the Photography Institute I was entitled to a student discount on Adobe products.  When I say discount it's not like 10 or 20%, its closer to 80%, and for a product like CS5 this make a HUGE difference.

You guessed it,  I now use CS5 extended which includes Bridge, mini-bridge and Camera Raw.  Plus I also got a months subscription to lynda.com where there a tons of tutorials videos on Photoshop and a whole host of other products.

This was one of the most challenging and interesting assignments so far and I have learnt a great deal from it.