Exploding Carrots

Before really learning about everything you can do with photoshop, my general understanding for it was a program to add or remove things or people from pictures. I didn't know about the wide variety of photoshop's uses, and my vague definition of a picture that was "photoshopped" was that someone's head was removed or something. This lab taught me that photoshopping isn't just for taking people out of pictures, it has many other, and much more creative uses as well.  In photoshopping this picture so that it looked lie the dynamite was inside of the carrots, I learned how to effectively change the image so that it looked convincingly different from the original in a way that would not be naturally possible. Using layers makes it very easy to place things on top of each other and to erase different aspects to make the two images merge into one new one. These techniques would be very useful for creating funny photos or to create eye-catching advertisements. 

Coffee Cups

Chipotle Ad

Winery Advertisement

Illustrator

Google Analytics Findings

I can't say that my blog has gotten so much activity to drastically change the data on my Google Analytics findings. I do have more visits, but it is just more from the same areas, not really anything new. But, then again, there's not really anything worth looking at if you're not involved in digital media class. I now have had 45 visits (only 18 unique visitors), up from five the last time I blogged about it. I now have visitors from Utah, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Washington DC, Vermont, New York, and Woburn, MA. Despite the variety of locations, Vermont and Woburn are the only places where anyone has spent more than zero seconds on the site. Woburn has 27 views, with 33% new visits. In Vermont, I have visits from South Burlington, South Londonderry, and West Dover, but South Londonderry is the only one with any time (I'm thinking that that's where my internet might show up as). The average time on my site is 2:48, a big improvement from 00:00 last time! I also have 40% new visits, 79 page views, and an average of 1.76 pages viewed per visit. So overall, I have a lot more usage, but I think its probably all from class work, which isn't surprising since I haven't used it for anything else.

Color Pop

Merging Photos

We learned how to merge photos in this assignment. I learned how to use the gradient tool, and how to add a vector layer. Also, I worked more on using the clone tool. This would be useful for making brochures or flyers where you want to display a lot of pictures in a way that you want to relate a lot of pictures. You could also use it to merge related pictures, for example a landscape, so that it looks like it is all one picture. It could be useful also to effectively mix two things that do not belong together to make a funny looking picture.

Four Funky Filters on Fotoshop

Photoshop Rainforest

I thought this was a fun assignment. I learned how to change the color and pattern of a specific object.  It was cool that you can keep the texture of the existing object by changing the opacity. It was difficult to make the edges blend in, especially when the background is a very different pattern than the object that I changed the color of. This would be useful for creating eye catching advertisements or to change what someone is wearing. It wouldn't be totally useful if you're editing pictures to look realistic. It would be good though for making creative pictures. 

One More Cow.

Photoshop Fun!

New Discoveries!

I have always just used Google to "Google" things. Sometimes I'll search for pictures or just on the web, but I never knew about all of the other features that Google offers. The "show options" tab is actually incredibly useful, and I didn't even know that it existed. I always figured that in order to narrow what you wanted to show up in results, you would have to change what you queried. I didn't realize that you could choose the source, size, or type of result that comes up by using the options side bar. I think the coolest feature was the "Wonder Wheel". It does all of you research for you! By typing in a main topic, the Wonder Wheel puts out different related searches and you can keep clicking on them until you have all of the searches that interest you on your topic. Its just like the mind mapping exercise that Bret has us do for 10 min on a piece of paper, except you just have to type in one thing and then keep clicking for maybe a minute until it brainstorms everything for you! This was my first real exploration of Google, and I can't believe what has been out there this whole time. I also am curious to see what I would find in 30 min more of exploration since I found all of these new features in just a couple minutes!!

Google Analytics

Opening up Google Analytics for the first time, I was hoping that I would be surprised with something like 20 views from a couple different countries. Instead I found that there had been five views, all from New York, South Burlington, and a town near Boston. The average time on the site was :00. 60% was direct traffic, and 40% was indirect. Also, 80% of the five users were new to the site. Looking at this data, I have come to the conclusion that no one has looked at my blog. This isn't surprising given that I don't have a link to it anywhere, and I haven't told anyone about it. Also, I must say that there isn't very much to see once you get there- one post about twitter. Not to say that that isn't interesting, it certainly wouldn't catch someone's eye if they were looking for cool things to read about on someone's blog. Hopefully as I continue to work on my blog, and add more articles, it will become a site that people visit regularly. But I guess I'm going to have to get pretty creative in the meantime.

I Was Wrong

I didn't know anything about twitter until Monday, other than that I figured it was just another time suck for people with tons of extra time to notify the world about what they are doing. It seemed pretty pointless to me. I think I was mostly wrong in that assumption. Now that I've gotten to know a little bit about it, I admit that is fun to use, and doesn't take that much time to tweet every now and then. I'm even starting to like it. In reading the article about the twitter revolution in Iran I realized that what I think of as a useless time waster has actually become a powerful political tool. It was amazing to read that the opposition protesters have used twitter as a method to circumvent the government's efforts to block their communication. I didn't ever think that twitter could actually have a legitimate use, and I was definitely wrong. This a great use of twitter, and I think that in the future, twitter will gain an even larger role in world communication and gain uses that we have never conceived before. We have only begun to take advantage of its potential.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/4436340