In my class this past week, we were tasked with finding a celebrity or social figure of some sort that we would like to ‘become’. Then we needed to find five pictures of them in their element. Last we needed to take pictures of ourselves imitating the person in the photos. They did not need to be particularly good pictures, just good enough that our faces were easily accessible. We were going to be Photoshopping our faces onto the pictures of our celebrity and trying to make it look as natural as possible. It seems simple enough right? Wrong. For a professor teaching an introductory class on photography and Photoshopping, she sure knew how exactly NOT teach us. I have never been so lost in a tutorial in my life so I apologize that I will not be able to give you a step by step guide of how to properly use Photoshop.
The experience of sitting in the class and having her go through a 50 step tutorial in like three minutes is surreal and left me with a very disturbing photo as a product for at least half the class. Imagine my head with the face (not the entire head, but JUST my face) moved about 5 centimeters to the right off of my head. It was not a pretty picture. But the thing with Photoshop is after you remove something or deselect a cut out, there is seemingly no way to reselect it and move it within the picture. So I sat there like an idiot with my face looking like it fell off my body. It is okay though, every one else looked pretty sad as well.
My teacher then showed me how to actually put my face on the body of the other person. Guess who I chose. Tina Fey! I made sure to pick some good pictures of her:
I will not be posting the pictures of me imitating her because they are pretty embarrassing but yeah. So know I’ll show you the image where I was actually able to get my face onto Tina’s body and have the skin tones kind of match. There is still a lot I need to learn about the ‘art of Photoshop’ but I figured that if I was going to use the topic of Photoshop in media in my advocacy project, then I needed to actually learn how to use it.