Self Portrait: Beauty & Age

 

Lecture Topic:

Portraiture, Issues of Beauty:

What is beauty? Cultural historical, ethical & economic considerations, are we commodities?

http://www.ephotoartist.com/Home.jsp?digitalphotoretouching=g

 

Screenings:

 

Visiting artist:

Dan Ostrov The Faces of RPI Project, IDI Sp’06

Open in IE browser only:http://www.arts.rpi.edu/~ruiz/IDI-spring2006/final/ostrov/realization.htm#

 

Readings: Sturken/Cartwright Chapter 3

Photo-retouching

 

Project:

1. Photograph yourself in three close up views: front, profile, and three quarter view. Bring your images into Photoshop at 300 dpi 1142 long x 768 wide pixels. Work from copies of the original images.

2. Select the front on view that you feel is the best and retouch the image to look as “beautiful” or “handsome” as possible.  Experiment with the many tools in Photoshop including layers, filters, paint and drawing tools, colors, palettes, etc…..

3. Take the original “best” view again and this time age your image to look at least 20 years older. 

 

Studio skills:

Basic digital photography,(camera, lighting set up) retouching, levels, image enhancement and correction, tonal and color manipulation techniques, layers, masks, selecting and cutting, pasting techniques (marquee, lasso, magic wand tools), tolerance, multiply, pen tool, paths, inverse, color range, feather, modify, magic eraser and background eraser, channels,  saving selections to channels.

 

Deliverables:

1. 5 images 1142 x 768 pixels at 300 dpi image using RGB colors saved as jpg

2. Presentation of your 5 images using the classroom projector. Your presentation should include a short description of at least three new techniques you used while making the images.

 

Grading Criteria:

1. Assignment completed on-time.

2. Adherence to the size and file format specifications

3. Appropriate use of Photoshop tools. (e.g. if jaggies are intended as an aesthetic, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be in the image because you used the wrong image resolution for the size of the images)

4. Exploration and application of creative tools in Photoshop.

5. Quality and clarity of class presentation

6. Quality, Realism and Believability of photo-retouching as illustrated in your final beauty & aged images.