The issues that I wanted to bring up for this assignment are the evolvement of computers and their impact on society and the issue of pollution. For the technology image, I wanted to represent how technology has taken over our minds and our way of thinking. Initially, I was thinking of using our mobile phones because I believe these were the catalyst for how much more we depend on technology and the internet but instead I wanted to use an old desktop computer to show the evolution. When old desktop computers were popular no one had any idea what they would evolve into and how much of an impact they would have on society which is what I wanted to demonstrate in my image. To create the image I used a total of 4 different images the background, the computer, the pixelated screen,m, and the men silhouette. For my second image, I wanted to talk about the issue of population. The amount of plastic and landfill in our waters is not good and it is not getting any better. For the image, I used a water background and multiple images of plastic and trash. I wanted to make them all seem like they are floating or even underneath the water. I also wanted to include how dirty our water has changed and I did that with the use of seaweed to demonstrate dirty water seeping into the clear blue water.
The technology image had no use of blending but a lot of masking, I used the select and mask tool. I masked the suit since the background was white and I replaced it with a blue background. For the computer, I masked the border of the computer and repeated the process and changed the size of the computer over and over again, and put them inside of one another. I also used the eraser brush to erase the small details that did not properly mask each computer border layer. For the pixelated screen I put on the top I used two and laid them on top of one another and used the eraser brush to take out the excess screen. The second image about pollution included more blending and a bit of masking. For the bottles and the plastic, I used a mix of the lasso and rectangle tools to make a sharp cut in the object so that the object could be seen as floating in the water. I played around with the brightness, vibrancy, and saturation// hues of each image of the object to get it to match the water and each other. Another tool that helped me blend the object into the water and soften the hard line was the blur tool. I used the blur too to soften the outer perimeter of the objects. For each layer, I duplicated it and make the opacity less than 30%, and played with the distortion tool to distort them as if the reflection was being distorted by the water. For a lot of the images like the bags that I knew I wanted to be underwater I made the opacity around 20% and played with the distortion tool so that it seems more accurate to what it would look like underwater.
