Marijke+Visser-+Editing+Thelma

My neighbor graciously agreed to let me photograph her on her scooter for this project. I explained we were learning about digital photography and photo editing, but I'm not sure she (or I) realized how much fun it would be or how carried away I could get. I used Paint.net for the editing. I had only used the resizing option before for uploading photos to a wiki. I spent much too long trying out different techniques, but here are some of the results: In the second photo I tried to "remove" the house in the background by changing the contrast/brightness. First I darkened the photo and then increased the contrast. I liked how I could drag the arrows and see the results immediately. I like the background, but I think Thelma's jacket is a little washed out now. In this photo I played with the hue/saturation effect. I also tried to figure out the layer process so I could add text. In theory I understand that each time I add something I add another layer, but it was not intuitive until I discovered how to open up "windows" on the page I was editing. I could view the layer box while I was editing to see which layer I was working on. I am still trying to use the layering window effectively! I also opened up the color window for the text. In Thelma 4 I used Thelma 2 as the base, adjusted the contrast and "posterized" it. After it was posterized I adjusted the contrast some more to change the shadowing on the street and driveway.



For **Thelma 6** and **Thelma 9**, I experimented with selecting an image and putting it on another background. I ended up using the "lasso select" tool to hand select Thelma. It was difficult to get a clean image and so when I pasted Thelma onto the whirlpool photo, I could see some background from the original photo. I added text, but had trouble with the different layers and could only add the text first and then the selected Thelma image (more to learn about layering!). **Thelma 9** came from learning how to clean up the edges of the selected image. I pasted the selected image on a new canvass and filled the background with the "paint bucket" tool. I then zoomed in until I could see the individual pixels well enough to use the "paint brush" tool to click around the selected Thelma image. This became **Thelma 7**. You can see the edges are still rough but there is no original background left. If I zoomed in even more, I could go pixel by pixel to get a smooth image. I didn't go that far. I am now going to make a collage of all the Thelmas with Google Picassa so I can give a copy to the real Thelma!