Project one: "Time of Day"

The goal of this project is to use basic color editing tools to change the apparent time of day of an image. As the sun rises and sets, as outdoor and indoor lights are turned on and off, the only visual changes that take place in a particular scene result from these changes in lighting. Therefore, you should arguably be able to adjust the time of day of a photo by selectively changing the localized lighting.

You will need to find and scan a starting image. Please use a spatial resolution between 600 and 1000 pixels on each dimension, and keep the spatial resolutions of both your starting and final image the same. You are free to use color modification tools such as brightness, contrast, HSV, and soft light to make the changes. Do NOT use any retouching, cut and paste, etc., even if you know these tools. This exercise is intended to get you familiar with color, both in terms of training your eye and in using a number of the color-correcting tools.

This project is due in two parts:

PART ONE due Wednesday, February 9 at the beginning of class

Bring the photo you are going to change and TWO reference images. For the purposes of this assignment, we’ll use the following three "times of day": night, dusk/dawn, and midday. You are free to choose a source image from any of these times of day. The reference images should be images taken from one of the other times of day, specifically, the time of day you are going to change your image to. The reference images need not be photographs, they could be from magazines, etc. PART TWO due Wednesday, February 16 at the beginning of class There will be a folder on one of the classroom Macs where both your scanned original image and the final image will need to be copied. I will tell you where to find this folder once it has been created. You are responsible for getting your images/projects into this folder by the beginning of class (unless we are unable to get the room open before class time, in which case we’ll copy them to the folder at the beginning of class). Use a lossless file format that can be read with Photoshop on the Mac. Save your images with a name such as:

ChrisPerry.start.tif

ChrisPerry.final.tif

so that I can clearly identify your work. It is your responsibility to make sure your images meet these criteria! I won’t consider your project handed-in until they do.