(Further) visual options/possibilities for the Romantic poetry anthology project:

This powerpoint itself (in the last sequence of slides, following the slides that present instructions) gives an example of one possibility for a visual interpretation of and accompaniment to the other aspects (literary and musical) of this project. It presents a portion of a Caspar David Friedrich painting (from a scan from a book) that has been altered in successive stages, using Adobe Photoshop. The colors have been shifted, and the values have been darkened from version to version. If you go to Slide Show and choose a Slide Transition option such as dissolve or Random Bars Horizontal or Vertical, you’ll see how the result is a pretty smooth and effective transition between these different versions of the image. It’s quite possible that you could find and similarly alter an image in successive stages in ways that coordinate with shifting moods or transitions in the poem you have chosen and are using. Beyond changing the color balance and darkness/contrast of an image, there are many other possibilities as far as image manipulation – but I’ll just hint at a couple here. In the “Filters” menu of Photoshop, you’ll find such options as Blur or Texture: these, and others you may decide to investigate, might be appropriate, again depending upon your poem and your intentions. Another possibility is to explore transitions between different images (that you may scan or may download from the web), and I’m including one or two slides showing how to start going about this, again using Photoshop (although you could certainly use the Slide Transition function of Powerpoint to do this work for you – but probably with more limited control than what you’d have with Photoshop.

Please note that Adobe Photoshop is available on all the computers in both the Music Tech room and in the Art Lab (A-109). You’ll look under programs and then under Adobe Master Collection CS3.

Assuming you’ve already downloaded an image from the web, or scanned an image, open it in Photoshop and follow the path shown at right: Image>Adjustments>Color Balance. (You can try many many other options under Adjustments; for color changes, these include Variations, not shown at right.) In the bottom screen shot, you’ll see the Color Balance dialog box, with three choices in terms of the values of the image that will be most affected by your actions (i.e., shadows, midtones, highlights) and the three color sliders that will produce shifts in color.

Let’s assume that you make a shift you like, producing a second version of the original image. You could save that second version as a copy (perhaps ending its file name with v2). Then, you could open that saved v2 file, make further adjustments, save that as a copy (“v3”), and so forth. In this way, you could generate a number of versions, with a color and/or contrast and/or overall brightness change made more or less smoothly from one to the next.

I’ve mentioned value (lightness-darkness) changes as a possibility. Here are two screen shots from Photoshop showing how to go about making such changes. Again, you’ll find what you need by starting from Image>Adjustments. This time, go to Levels. (“Brightness/Contrast” would also be a good option.) If you go to Levels, you’ll see two sets of sliders. If you want to make your image higher contrast, use the top set, under “Input Levels.” If you want to lower the contrast, use “Output Levels.” You’ll find soon enough which direction on which sliders darken and lighten various values. You can see how the image has gotten darker (and a bit higher contrast) in the background of the second (bottom) screenshot at the right.

Once you have generated a number of such versions (and please note that you could make a number of other changes along the way: for example, by cropping successive versions of the image, you can create the effect of zooming in) of an image, you would want to save them as PICT files and then paste them into your powerpoint file.

I mentioned earlier the possibility of using Photoshop to create transitions between images. In these three screen shots, you’ll see the beginning steps in such a process. First, open another saved image in Photoshop. You’ll see, at top right, that I’ve used the marquee tool (a box defined by dotted lines, shown as the second tool down in the vertical tool bar directly to the left of the image) by clicking and dragging, and have thus selected the specific area of the image within the dotted lines. I’ve then gone to Edit>Copy to copy that area. Then, I’ve clicked my original file with another image, and have pasted in the new image (Edit>Paste). The way Photoshop works, this new image is pasted automatically into a new later, such that the underlying (“original”) image is not actually deleted or lost. In the screenshot at bottom right, you’ll see that I’ve dragged the pasted image to the upper left corner of the file, and am getting ready to scale the image so that it becomes the same size as the underlying image. To do this, I’ve gone to Edit>Transform>Scale. Doing this and then letting go of the mouse will give you little handles at the corners of your image: then, click and drag until you’ve sized the image as desired. You’ll then need either to hit the enter key or click on an icon (near the upper menu bar) that has a checkmark on it in order to apply this scaling of the image.

To create a transition between the two images, you can then play with the opacity slider in the layers palette. The layers palette shows you which images/imagery you’ve got on various layers of the file, and to show this palette you’ll need to go to Windows>Layers (or hit the f7 key): see screenshot below. In the screenshot at the right, you can see that I’ve set the opacity slider to 71%, which is allowing us to see the original image through the recently pasted-in one. If you saved a number of versions of a file, in which you turn the opacity down each time, you will create a sequence of images that will give you a fade sort of transition.