Toasters

Jerry Yarnetsky

=Toasters=

I have some Photoshop experience so I tried to push my abilities. In surfing the web I had found a website called [|Digimods] where this British fellow has "Photoshopped" cars to look like hotrods. Some of them are pretty cool. But what was even cooler was the [|set of tuturials] he created to show how he accomplished his effects. I thought I wouldn't have time to try any of them until after I graduated this December, but I couldn't resist given this assignment. I started with one of the more straight forward modifications where you can change the color of specific parts of a photo.

Here's how it works in a nutshell. You make a copy of the original photo by creating a "duplicate layer." Then "desaturate" this layer to make it gray. You can then make this new layer any color you want using the "variations" commands. This gives you a colored monotone of the image. Now here's where the fun starts. You start by "selecting" the background with the lasso tool and once an area is selected you can delete that part of the image. *Poof* The original image below shows through. You continue until only the areas you wanted colored remain. By making the colored layer partially transparent, the shading and details from the original photo also shine through.

The first photo is the original toaster. In my experiment I only wanted to re-color the white part so I deleted everything but that part. The new layer looks like the second image.



I was then able to repeatedly duplicate this layer, again make it gray and changing it's color. The results follow...



Like Ben Dickerson's Disney photo, the series of toasters does have a bit of a Warhol look to it.

I did another Photoshop creation for my learning portion of the fiesta. I've done this modification before, but I thought I'd show where it came from...

For my story, I wanted a [|flying toaster] like those in the old screensaver and Jefferson Airplane album.

First I found an eagle photo from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service repository. I then made a toaster photo facing the same direction as the eagle. I then cut the wings out-- each individually-- and pasted them into separate layers so I could place one in front and one behind the toaster. This is possible as you can rearrange layers in photoshop.





You'll just have to read my learning project for this to make sense.