This is my finished product for the Visual Assignment called “Switch Up The Mood.”  The object of this assignment was to take a picture and edit the hues, colors, saturation, exposure, etc. in order to change the mood of a picture.  When I started this assignment, I knew I wanted to use a picture from my trip to Europe.  For some reason, when I upload pictures from my camera, they seem to have a gray hue to them.  I am always editing my pictures when I upload them in order for them to look prettier.  (So this assignment was right up my alley).  I immediately thought of Amsterdam, one of my favorite stops in Europe.  There was something about the canals and the architecture of buildings (and house-boats) that drew me in!  When I wasn’t dodging people on bicycles, I was admiring all Amsterdam has to offer.  Anyway, that’s where my inspiration for this assignment came from.  The easy part was picking a picture and actually “changing the mood” by playing with it’s colors.  It is pretty clear that the first image is very gray and the second one has a pop of color.

Now to the difficult part.  In my eyes, this assignment should have been at least 3 stars!  While I LOVE my new mac, I was really missing my old Paint application on a windows computer.  I could have easily combined the two pictures using Paint.  However, I had to figure out how I was going to combine the pictures into one new one.  This was NOT easy.  I spent a lot of time trying it on my own before I finally thought to google it.  Apparently people have had trouble with this in the past so my resources were plentiful.  I finally figured out (after much work) that the best way to do this was to open each picture in its own window.  I then lined up the windows so that in front of me, I saw the two images aligned.  I then took a screen shot using Shift, Control, 3.  From there, I had to open the image in my photo previewer.  I used the “Select” tool which allowed me to form a box around what I wanted to see.  (This means I could put a box around the two images lined up without having my browser and outside images show).  Then I went to File at the top of my screen and hit Open In New Window.  When I did that, only the images showed up and I was able to save it as a picture.

Phew, was that a lot!! As much time as I put in to figure that out, I am definitely glad I did.  Now I know how to do it in the future.  Plus, I think this assignment was really neat!