For our digital photo-editing assignment, I chose this photo of a dying star as my jumping off point:
Credit goes to NASA Goddard Photo and Video, the contributors were listed as NASA, ESA and A.Zijlstra (UMIST,Manchester, UK). Here's the stable link to the photo.
The first online photo editor I used was Picnik:
I ended up using the Temperature, Contrast, and Rotation tools, as well as adding some text, rounding the corners of the image and adding a matte and frame. Overall I just found that Picnik was too simplistic for me and didn’t allow me to be as creative as I would have liked, although I can see that people would find it helpful for simple adjustments. However, since most operating systems come with some free software which allows you to crop and rotate photos, and even Paint will let you do a lot of these things, I'm not sold on Picnik. I'd rather use a computer program because I find it to be faster than visiting a website.
Next, I chose Splashup, and although I found it to be a frustrating experience, the end product was pretty cool:
I used a Filter to invert the colours of my photo, making it a very “cool” image. I like how when you invert it, you notice aspects of the dying star more than you would have in the original. For example, we can see the action happening in the center of the dying star much more vividly. I decided to use another filter, “Emboss” to give the image a sort textured aesthetic. Splashup has good filters but the other, more basic tools just refused to cooperate. Also, it’s basically a program that runs on Flash, and it just couldn’t handle even saving my edited photo, so I resorted to using a screen capture.
I hope my classmates had a more pleasant experience than I did!
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