Photoshop Shortcut Cheat Sheets

Here are the Photoshop Shortcut Cheat Sheets that I showed in class. Feel free to save them or print them off! Hope it helps...

Week 5: Photoshop Layers

Today in class we had our portrait critique. Y'all did great! I'm really excited to be working with everyone this semester.

We did a photoshop tutorial today in class, on how to make a Mirrored Portrait Triptych. Per my usual self, I made everything WAY more complicated than it needed to be.

So I have redone the tutorial, and made it much, much simpler to follow and to execute. 

Mirrored Portrait Tutorial – Vimeo

Assignment for this week: "Mirrored Portrait Triptych"

• I want you to watch the video tutorial. 

1. Locate your portraits. 
• Process portrait in Lightroom. (color, exposure, crop.)
2. Make mirrored portraits in Photoshop, via the tutorial.
• You should have a left mirrored portrait and a right mirrored portrait. 
3. Place the original, the right, and the left portrait onto a single canvas in Photoshop. (in any order)
1.  Make sure to have an even border all around your images. 
• Save as a JPEG.
• (I saved it as a TIF in the tutorial. Save the final to upload as a jpg.)
• File name 
4. Upload to your blog no later than before class on 10/4. 

The Alphabet assignment is also due on 10/4. Please upload to your blog prior to class.

Please bring all files on a separate harddrive or flash drive to class.

• Please label images in the following format: lastnamefirstname_project_001.jpg. 
• Ex: SmithKristina_Triptych_001.jpg, SmithKristina_Alphabet_001.jpg, SmithKristina_Alphabet_002.jpg etc. 

Week 4: Adobe LR/PS, Portraits, and Aplhabets... Oh My!

Nicola Kuperus

Today in class we went over art opportunities, basic Lightroom editting, and basic photoshop layers. If you are behind on blogposts, please get these up to date no later than this weekend. 

Assignment for this week: "Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others"

1. I would like you to go through the portraits that we shot in class the other day, and chose 5 of your favorite images. 1 portrait must be a self-portrait. And 1 portrait must be of someone else. The remaining 3 are your choice, (Self or Other). You will take these 5 images and process them in Lightroom:
• If you do not feel confident about the portraits you have taken, please RESHOOT. You should feel good about your work. Shoot until you do. 

• In Lightroom: Make sure to do your White Balance, color corrections, exposure, contrast, and any cropping. And then EXPORT the images as jpegs. 

• You will then post these 5 images to your blog prior to next class, 9/27. Post should be titled "Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others." The day of the class, please bring these images on a harddrive / thumbdrive to turn in, we will be projecting them for the critique. 

• Please label images in the following format: lastnamefirstname_portraits_001.jpg. 
• Ex: SmithKristina_portrait_001.jpg, SmithKristina_portrait_002.jpg, etc. 

Monica Ruzansky, Dicen Que

2. I would like you to continue shooting for the Alphabet assignment. 

• You will photograph a minimum of two complete sets of the alphabet. 

• (Remember, there are 26 letters in the alphabet. 1 image for each letter. Each complete set must be different, So at least 52 images total.)   

• You will process one alphabet set in color and one in black and white. The letters should be made from your image composition, and not from shooting actual letters or typefaces that you may find on signs! Two sets are due, the friday after next, on October 4. We will process these in class on Friday, September 27, so please have something to work with. And the final image will be posted to your blog as one final image. 
• See the example below:

                                           

Lightroom

Today in class we talked a bit about Photography workflow, the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop, and the difference in file formats. (JPEG, RAW, DNG) We also looked at importing images into a library, creating catalogs, and organizing images. You should have the previous assignment, (the Questionare and Portrait posts) complete and uploaded to your blog. 

Check out this great link about Lightroom.

ASSIGNMENT For this week: 

• Screenshot: I'd like you to create the file archive system that we in reviewed in class and take a screenshot of it (command*shift*4) and post it to your blog.

• Blog/Article Review: I want you to look at an art/photography blog, (suggested links to the right), and look it over, and post to your blog the following about a recent (past few months) post:
• Blog Name
• Title of the article or artist
• Image from the article or artist
• 1 short paragraph addressing the blog as a whole. Some talking points to consider:
• Who is the blogger? How is the site organized? Is it easy to read/visually appealing? How often do they post and what are their main posts about? Is it an art blog or just photography?
• 1 short paragraph addressing the article/artist. Some talking points:
• What is the article about? Who is the artist? What kind of work do they do? Were you interested, excited, curious, disinterested by what you read? If so, why? 
• Link to the blog/article

• Alphabet and Portraits: The entire alphabet is is not due next class period, but I would like you to begin shooting and challenge yourself to begin seeing the lines and shapes around you differently. You should be continuing to shoot portraits of yourself and others, and now start to find and shoot "found" alphabets. Next class period, I will show you a bit on Photoshop and how to size images, create a layer, work in color/BW and crop your images to create a single final image. These techniques will come in handy for the remainder of the assignments. Check the blog this week to for more posts!

Kuhler

Kuhler Color Wheel

I wanted to post this before I forget. It's a wonderful way to help understand color and to understand what colors look good with what. It can help you pick colors for your website, your blog, or even your house/bedroom. Isn't the internet cool?

https://kuler.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

Exhibit / Lecture Opportunity // Contemplation: Emerging Female Photographers from Japan

Via Susan kae Grant:

Hello Friends & Colleagues!

Please join us in welcoming the artists and curators from Japan and Bloomigton, IN for a lecture, artists' talk, and panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition Contemplation: Emerging Female Photographers from Japan. The events take place this Thursday in the TWU Fine Arts Gallery at 4:00 and a reception will follow in the foyer of the Fine Arts Building. 

Contemplation: Emerging Female Photographers from Japan was guest curated by Mariko Takeuchi and James Nakagawa and features work by Tomoe Murakami, Yuki Tawada, Yuhki Toyama, and Ai Takahashi. The exhibition has generously been loaned to TWU by Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, Indiana.

Exhibition Dates: August 27 to September 18 / Reception: September 12th, 5-6pm

Lecture: September 12th, 4pm. / Mariko Takeuchi: Female Photographers from Japan Since the 19th Century.
Artist’s Talks: Yuki Tawada & Ai Takahashi.
Panel Discussion: MarikoTakeuchi, James Nakagawa and Artists.

Hope to see you on Thursday!

Susan

Susan kae Grant, 

Professor of Art

Texas Woman's University

Dept. of Visual Art

Photographs depict no more than what is visible. Yet at the same time they possess the uncanny ability to reveal the invisible. Just as the hands of the clock mark the linear passing of time, photography can mark our memory, consciousness, desires, and emotions. Beyond merely documenting the visible world, one of the photographers’ roles is to create a space for reflecting and gazing upon such invisibilities. This exhibition introduces the work of four emerging Japanese female photographers who engage these invisibilities from various angles.

Tomoe Murakami stares at the boundary between the visible and the invisible through her ephemeral landscapes which are often filled with mist or clouds. By erasing and scratching the surface of her prints, Yuki Tawada uncovers a strength and inter-dependence which transcends the people and cities captured in her images. It can be said that Murakami traces the limit of photography from the inside while Tawada does so from the outside. In snap-shot photographs by Yuhki Toyama, everyone and everything look isolated while longing for the other. This is how she reveals the deeper darkness which swallows an individual even as he/she is not willing to admit it. Ai Takahashi’s continuous shooting of remote rural villages and their inhabitants illuminates the accumulated experience of place that runs perpendicular to our urban linear experience of time.

The title of this exhibition CONTEMPLATION comes from the Latin contemplatio meaning the “act of looking at” something. In turn this stems from contemplo meaning “to gaze attentively, observe.” More important is that its original meaning was “to mark out a space for observation (as an augur does).” These photographers, too, delineate from, within the real world a space for observation and contemplation of the invisible. Viewing ourselves in this consecrated space we cannot help but reconsider our individual and collective pasts and futures.

Mariko Takeuchi, Curator
James Nakagawa, Co-Curator

13th Annual Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition

Established in 2001 and organized by the graduate photography students at Texas Woman’s University and the Photographic Artists’ Coalition (a student-run photography organization), the annual Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition provides a national venue for the exhibition of artistic expression as seen through the eye of the camera. Photographers from throughout the United States are invited to submit entries for the exhibition, then works are juried by an invited professional in the photographic field. The exhibition is on view to the public at the Texas Woman’s University Fine Arts Galleries every Spring semester.

​

The exhibition and endowment was established by alumnus Christine Shank and a small group of graduate students and named in memory of the mother of Professor Susan kae Grant. Exhibition proceeds fund the Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition Endowment which supports photography scholarships for future graduate students in the Department of Visual Arts.

This years juror is Elizabeth Siegal. She is the Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. Juried works are showcased in one gallery, and one artist is chosen to have a solo show of their week the following year. This year's solo show artist is Lydia Panas. 

Lydia Panas, Liam with Blue Fabric, from the series "Untitled (something like love)" 

Installation view of juried pieces from the West Gallery, 2013

Jen Davis

Jen Davis

Jen Davis is a photographer based out of Brooklyn, NY. She has been working on a series of Self-Portraits for the last 12 years dealing with issues of identity, beauty, and body image. Her images investigate both the physical and psychological idea of relationships and also explore the male as subject. She received her BA from Columbia College Chicago in 2002 and her MFA from Yale University in 2008. 

What I find to be the most interesting aspect in her series of Self-Portraits, is her ability to convey a multitude of emotions and personal experiences before the camera. At times, she looks afraid and vulnerable, and yet in other photographs, she appears confident. Almost defiant. Her images give me a sense of her self-perception and also how others may perceive her. You can view more of her work here.

This is an example of how I would like the portrait photographer blog posts to be listed.

Portraits of Self, Portraits of Others

Emmit Gowin

Today, I will show you some great portraits and we'll get in groups and we'll start planning to photograph one another. Find five great portrait photographers online, tell me who took the pictures and why you like the images, and add them to your blog before next class. Your goal is to make five great portraits of each person in your group, including yourself. The photograph needs to be strong compositionally, be interesting to look at, and should tell us something about the person being photographed. A pretty tall order, sounds a lot like a collaboration between the subject and the photographer to me...


Make sure you bring your pictures with you to next class, on your hard drive. 
ALL OF THEM. 

The following images were made by Edward Curtis, he is the fellow on the right with the fine hat and goatee. He started this project to record the way of life of the North American Indian in 1907, and made more than 40,000 images of them. You can see many of them at the Library of Congress.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=edward%20curtis

Questionare

Questions please...

Please take some time to fill out this questionnaire and include in on your blog. It's due on your blog before the next class.


1. What’s your major? What year will you graduate?

2. Why did you choose a photography class (or photography as a major), and what do you hope to learn from school in general and this class specifically?

3. What are your goals after graduation? Please list your goals in reverse order, starting five years out, then three, two, one, and six months.

4. What artists, musicians, photographers, writers, movies, books have influenced you/your work?

5. Are there any important websites that you are referencing for art/photo competitions and/or information?

6. What museums and/or galleries have you been to in the past year?

7. Have you had any photo projects and/ or training in the past?

8. What is the value of art for the artist?

9. What is the value of art for the audience?

10. Is photography a vocation or an avocation?

11. What is your passion?

12.What are you afraid of? What makes you uncomfortable?

13. Do you have a passport? Are you a traveller?

14. Who is your favorite artist? And why?

15. Why did you sign up for this class? What do you hope to learn from it?