Tool Palette Customization: With this tool you can change your tool palette! You can move things around, add different tools and/or delete them!

Burn Tool: You use it to naturally darken parts in the picture. You can change the highlights, the shadows and the midtowns.

Sponge Tool: You use this tool to change the colors. You can either saturate the part you want, or de-saturate it!

Clone Stamp: You use this to clone parts of the image! You select one part to clone, and then paint over another part so it looks like the first thing you selected!

Versions: Every time you save your picture, it goes to versions! So you can go back any time you want to what it previously looked like the last time you saved!

Full Screen: You can go full screen with this tool! You click a button and your pixel matter fills the whole screen.

Auto Save: Auto save saves your photo's changes! So if you quit Pixelmator and didn't save your picture, it was auto-saved, and all your changes are still there!

Install Pixelmator: You can install pixelmator onto your iPad! Just go to the app store, and you can buy it, and download it, easy!

Dodge Tool: You use this to naturally lighten parts of the picture! You can lighten the highlights, shadows, and midtowns.

Smudge Tool: You use this tool to smudge things! You can make cool textures and make things smudgy with it!

Healing Tool: You can select things in your image that you don't want there. And the tool makes those things disappear and gather things near it to make it look like it never existed.

Eyedropper Tool: You use this to pick out colors. You put the tool over a color you want to replicate and use it.

Red-eye Tool: If you get red eyes in a picture you take, this is what you use! You select the tool and place it over the pupil, and it takes out the red, and makes it look like a normal eye.

Layer Groups: If you have lots of layers, you can use this. You put layers in a group so it's not as messy.

Cropping Images: If you want your image smaller, or want to change the size you use this. You can make it bigger or smaller but you use this to take out parts of the image.

Exporting Images: You use this to put the image in other places, or change the file type. You can put it on the web, but you can make it a certain file type, if you'd like.

Opening Images: This shows you how to open an image in pixelmator. You can use the photo browser palette, drag it, etc.

Polygonal Lasso Tool: You can select a shape with this tool.  It mostly makes straight lines though, so it's good for cutting out straight/angular objects.

Magic Wand Tool:  This is also a select tool. It selects an area of color and you can do what you want with that.

Marquee Selection Tools: With these tools, you select things. You can select squares, circles, so many things, it's quite exciting, really.

Lasso Tool: This is another selection tool. It's more flexible than the others, and you can select weird shapes and things with this one.

Gradient Tool:  You can make gradients with this tool. You can make circular ones, horizontal ones and vertical ones!

Quickly Remove Unwanted Background: This is helpful for removing backgrounds. Sometimes you don't want the background, and just want a single piece of the picture.

Article Response

I absolutely agree to the article! As I was looking at my picture, I think (as mentioned in class) that I definitely made the skin to smooth and blurry, and the eyes waaaaaaaaay too creepy and bright. I think that I did pretty well with making the picture feel warm, but the biggest thing was making her look like an actual person. But what the person said in the article made a lot of sense to me.

What I Learned

In the video, the parts I learned the most from were near the endish half of the video. I've never really done anything with masks before, and so I think nit was a good learning experience to do that, and it DID make the skin look pretty alright. I also didn't know how to select a certain part of the picture (the eyes, in this case) and make them a new layer so I could edit them. I think those two things were the main things I learned with this tutorial.

Edit

Before:

After:

In this article, I learned a lot. I hadn't really thought of all the little things that you can do to effect your picture. I didn't realize that portraits could take so much planning and posing and etc. I really hope that I can remember this for the next time I take portraits of people.

A couple that looked kind of cool me, was the texture, over expose, posing and unfocused and colors. They all were very interesting looking. I want to be able to take a photo that actually looks good and also focuses on these different things. Just to experiment with stuff would be really fun. 

My photos

For this one, I was trying to make it a close up picture, and I wish I'd gone a little closer, 

but I couldn't get very good picture like that. So I took it, and I blurred the background, made it more in focus and changed the exposure and levels. 

I meant for this picture to be kind of a texture-y picture.

 My model wrinkled her nose and in real life, it looked all wrinkly and texture-y, but in the picture it was hard to capture that. I tried sharpening it and I changed the colors a little. 

With this picture, I tried to make it dark, but with a lighter part of her face, kind like in the example on the article how there was a light part of her face and dark background. I lightened her a face and darkened the background. I went to a dark dark dark area to take it, and I took a candle right by her face, to make it stand out.

This picture is a shadow of a hand. I put it in front of a light and everything, but it wasn't super dark, so with editing, I made it darker and more recognizable for what it was. I like how there's the speckle-y background and fives it a few cool layers. 

What I Learned

First off, I thought this was a really fun and interesting project. I like editing pictures, I think it's really fun. But I realized while I was editing my photos, that it can be better not to edit the picture too much. I tried to not make it look fake, but I liked making Ellie's eyes look really blue, so that might make it a little unrealistic. But I learned how different tools can effect different things, like too much contrast can make things look kind of weird, although I really like messing with things like contrast and exposure. But it seemed that you can only use a little bit of each thing without going way overboard.

Edits

Articles

First Article (the one about beginning photography):

It's funny, it seems that all the things that this photographer said is what Jonny said! What a coincidence! 

But I think that what he says makes a lot of sense. I especially liked that last part, because I like pictures that have a lot of detail, and focus on one thing rather than everything, I think. 

I really noticed how with the two picture of the branch, the one with more focus on one thing, I liked it far more. I stood out to me more, I guess. But it might be because the branch is the part of the picture that was in focus. But I think that with my camera that I use, I have it on auto. So next time I take pictures, I think I'll try to set it to one of the setting he suggested. 

Second Article: 

I liked reading about all the different ways to have better composition. It's quite interesting to me to see different ways to add different elements to the picture. Like, how adding lines in the picture can make it more interesting what interesting to me, because it seems kind of logical in my mind, how your eyes automatically follow the lines. Another thing that I seriously agreed with, was to simplify things. 

I think that having too many things in your picture can make it feel too busy and overwhelming. I like it when pictures that draw focus to one thing in the picture, instead of far too many things. All these different tips on composition was so interesting! I hope to apply it to the next time I take pictures. 

Christmas Pictures