Photography and Image Editing

Another Project from My Media Computer Science Degree

Another project from my Media Informatics degree program at THM at the Friedberg campus. The goal of the course was to learn the fundamentals of photography and image editing. In the end, we had to submit a final piece where we applied what we learned and documented our workflow.

The Subject

As a sci-fi fan, I obviously wanted to do something in that direction. What came out of it is a homage to Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. In my version, I took on the role of Adam, and instead of God, an alien extends its index finger through a portal in the wall toward me.

Creation

For the implementation, I used GIMP and Blender. I started with a photo of myself sitting on a green beanbag, facing a wall. In Blender, I created four separate scenes, which I then assembled in GIMP. I could have put everything together directly in Blender as well, but the focus of the course was on classic image editing, so GIMP was the right stage.

The four scenes were: the alien itself, the portal fog, a sci-fi background from which the alien emerges, and a cross-section of the wall that disguises that, behind the "hole" in the photo, there's simply another layer.

I put a lot of effort into the shadow cast by the alien, I drew it entirely by hand in GIMP.

The portal should also leave a lilac glow on the alien. Since it came from two separate scenes, I painted that light reflection by hand too.

For the sci-fi background, I quickly reused an unreleased render from an animation that I still had saved on my hard drive at the time.

Conclusion

In the end, I assembled everything in GIMP using layers and layer masks, and that was it. I passed the course, even though I used GIMP instead of Photoshop.

The reason: at the time, I had already stopped using Windows and Adobe products. And, as my entire studies have shown, you don't need expensive proprietary tools to be successful in media design, animation, or video editing.

Even a DIN A3 print of the project hung up for a while in the hallway at THM, almost like an advertisement for the course. These days, the poster hangs on my door at home.

Looking back, I should have removed the power strip at the bottom of the image, it still feels a bit distracting.