I admit it. I’m a hack. I know enough about Photoshop to be dangerous, but not really enough to know if what I’m doing is correct. And after reading Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop Restoration & Retouching, I am flat-out breaking some cardinal rules.
I never use layers. Gasp. I just move the sliders around until I like what I’ve got. No! I don’t flatten my images when I’m done. Sacrilege.
Okay, kidding aside. I read this book and realized all the mistakes I was making and how they probably weren’t helping me get the most out of my own images, let alone restore or retouch historic ones. Not that I’ve ever tried this before last week’s class. Furthermore, I realize that I was using Photoshop in the most inefficient way imaginable.
Truth be told, I never effectively learned it beyond surface-level adjustments. Someone in the photo department at work showed me how to open, resize, crop, stroke, adjust some curves and sharpen images for use on our sites and I never looked back. For the last 6 years, I think I’ve expressed, at least twice a year, a desire to really learn it. To take a class. Or watch a tutorial or something. But I never found the time.
So I was very happy there was a Photoshop book and an images assignment on the syllabus. At least I hope to get beyond this basic understanding of what these things do. And I have to admit, I already know what I’m doing wrong. And potentially, how to fix it, so that’s a start, right?
As a happy coincidence, I have a bunch of photos to play with, so I tried my hand at some of the tone and contrast adjustments.
Take for example these shots of poor Mrs. Barnes, who asphyxiated in her kitchen.
The image on the left is the original shot. I’m terrible at calculating light and exposure, so I took an image that’s washed out and badly exposed.
I knew I wanted the colors to pop, so I adjusted the tone using curves and then fiddled with the saturation until I got the look I wanted. In the image on the right, the colors are richer. You can actually see the blues and reds in her apron and the auburn in her hair. More importantly you can see bright pink in her cheeks indicative of asphyxiation. Do you see it? (I did crop the image, which is why she’s much closer on the right. I promise, they are the same.)
Anyway, I’m not super thrilled with the ridiculously white refrigerator door, but given what is in the book, I can continue to tweak it and see what I come up with.
I haven’t tried hand-coloring since class. That was a bit of an explosion of peach and red on that poor man’s face!
Morris and Photo Staging
I am very impressed with how everyone has, so far, addressed the issues raised by the Morris readings. I know that as an editor of both a magazine and a website, I’ve made very specific photo assignments, because I needed a specific visual or emotion to match the accompanying story. The only “staged” images I’ve ever requested were for the express purpose of stock art. (I worked for an equestrian magazine and surprisingly, you can’t buy useful equestrian stock art at istockphoto..)
I won’t recap it here, namely because Clay, Kellie, Zayna, Ruel, Roger and Laura all do a fantastic job of starting an interesting conversation about the matter on their own blogs. But I do think it is worth noting that photos, like text, need to be read with the potential bias of their creators in mind.
As Dr. Larry Levine told us in his Reading Autobiography class back in 2003, reading autobiography as a primary source is extremely dangerous because each author was trying to present an image of themselves to the reader. Similarly, most photographers are attempting to evoke a certain perspective. Theirs.
While it’s impossible for me to fake images of these dolls (they are glued to the floor), I can use Photoshop to highlight certain aspects of the images, say by making the blood redder or more grotesque. It takes a light hand on the editing front and a sharp mind on the analysis. Much like with my colorization project, I’m still learning about the light hand.
Turns out Zayna and I are in the same boat with color – red to be precise, which is a fabulous color, but difficult to use correctly. I also commented on Clay’s discussion of color, which in my mind sparked a “what’s better” debate: good content on a non-designed site or gorgeous design and so-so content? I think even online, content has to remain “king.” The “history” has to remain. It should be well-researched, well-thought out and well-argued. But I also think a site needs to present the content in a compelling way. Since I tend to lean towards clean sites with a lot white, honing my eye for design is something I will have to work on.
I also gave Lisa some feedback on her text assignment and commented on Jon’s post on visual explanations.
I was looking forward to revisiting Edward Tufte this week. In 2000, I scammed a free trip to one of Tufte’s day-long seminars in Crystal City. At the time, I was working for Sallie Mae as one of their web content writers and often, my work required drilling down complicated loan details into digestible webby bits. One of the ways we were hoping to make that easier was by (smartly) using visuals.
While sending a lowly web writer to a seminar discussing the 30,000 foot view of visualization was probably not the most utilitarian of ideas, I did appreciate the fact that I was getting a nice overview of the importance of proper visualizations and the theory behind what is good and what is bad. Not that I think I ever fully realized my goals of making kick-ass visualizations.
Years, age and more education later and I still know the difference between a good visual and a bad one and yet, I’m still not sure I could easily create one. I still architect visualizations for work and I think that a visual is only as good as the data you have underneath. furthermore, visualizations are only as effective as person creating the visual has an understanding of the underlying data. And I think this is the rub. And the irony. Time and detailed study are required to create a visualization that people can quickly find and skim for the pertinent information. Gobs of info in a quick byte.
I’m still striving to deal with data in intelligent ways. When I come across something I really like, like the video in my very first post here, I spend some time and really look at what they’ve done and how. The Onion does them well, but I think it’s easier to build them when you aren’t as stressed about the integrity of the data, which I ended up having to do quite a bit during my five-year stint running an entertainment channel at AOL.
Complicated or nuanced data is a bit tougher to deal with. And as much as Tufte hates it, USAToday has created a level of expectation for these things. And if we are attempting to attract and audience larger than 20, it would do us well to consider that.
And again, we are back at the question that spans two Clio courses: who are building these suckers for?
I believe we can strive to cut a middle line where we remain academic and true to our standing as historians, and still make the data easy to digest and recall at a later time. After all, I think Dr. Hans Rosling toes this line pretty well in his video. I have no doubt about the veracity of the underlying data, nor do I think it’s shallow by any means.
So upon my re-read, many years later, of Visual Explanations, I think it still stands the test of time. We have more accessible data visualization tools now and a bit more experience in viewing these on the web than we did when it was first published. We can still strive to find the right balance between information and accessibility. As a budding historian, it’s certainly a goal that I have.
Though the fake ones are amusing!
see more Funny Graphs
I finished up my Type assignment last night. Like most of our other classmates who’ve expressed such things, I spent an inordinate amount of time on it. Even still, I’m not totally happy with it.
For the final project, I might do what Ruel did and use a graphic for my rule instead of that long line. I put a dividing line between my content and my footnotes and I don’t like the way you can’t tell the difference between the two rules.
Additionally, I’m not crazy about my actual text. (I know the point of this project was to code the layout of the text, but still…) Since I am creating this project from scratch I think I’m going to have to spend some quality time actually writing up my thoughts and research in a way that will be usable for my project.
Which brings me to the question of purpose-built content. It has been very interesting for me to read how all of you took existing text and applied it to this project. Specifically, those of you who struggled with how to deal with the length. Since I did not use something from my back pocket, I had length issues on the other end of the spectrum. Namely, how much is enough to formulate a real discussion online? Whatever the answer, I don’t think I made it this week, as what I have feels more skeletal than anything.
And this has led to me ponder the concept of purpose-built content for consumption online. Much like my beloved Nutshells were purpose-built to be used as training tools, and only as tools, I think I’m going to have to widen my thinking about creating and consuming history online. Not to get too metaphysical here, but this becomes a bit of a chicken and egg question: which exists first? The concept for the site or the research behind it?
If the concept for my proverbial future site exists first, specifically, if I say to myself, “Self, this is a really cool subject and I think you should study it and make it into a website, because that is the best format AND audience for it.” Well then I’ll have to visualize the guts of my scholarship in a different way than if I churn out a really good paper and decide to post it online. (And then I will get medication for talking to myself in such a way.)
Those are two very different sites, with very different purposes. As such, everything about them would be, for lack of a better word, different: design, presentation, information architecture — all would need to play the appropriate part to bring the scholarship alive in the right way.
This post-assignment rambling is meant only to really force myself to think about how to proceed from here. I’m not sure about you, but once I got past fighting with the endnotes, it seemed to me that we really are at a turning point with this assignment. We now have to get beyond making our sites work and really start thinking about the specifics about our projects and how we want to present them. And for me, that is the scariest question. And right now, I have no answers. So I throw this question to you? Do you think I’m over-thinking it?
And I came across a hand (machine?) colored image of my maternal grandmother when she was a toddler. But it struck me that this was a b&w photo that had been painted. It was her favorite photo of her as a child. I remember the b&w from my great grandmother’s house, but I never noticed before that this was colored after it was taken. And here I thought colorizing photos was just something that was done with Photoshop. I’m now very curious how they did it. On the original, you can even see the pink of her coat in the white margins of the photo.