In this assignment, you’ll practice the Photoshop tools that you learned in class, and apply them to your own photographs. You’ll also tell a very short story in a looping animated GIF.

Tone five photos

1. Select five of your favorite photos from last week’s photo roll assignment.
2. Open them in Photoshop (most computer labs on campus have this program) and make the following adjustments to them (not every photo needs — or should have — every adjustment, but between your five images, you should cover all of these): crop image to 16 x 9 dimensions, adjust the shadows & highlights to adjust the light balance, add a new layer and add some text, select a specific area and make that section black and white, and inverse a selection and add a different adjustment.
3. For each image, save for web & devices and decrease the image size (1000 px wide should be ok) and quality (try 75%).
4. Post the before and after photos on your blog, and include a caption for each to explain what you did.

Animated GIF

1. Take a series of photos of a repeated action. You should have 5-10 images from the beginning to the end of the action. The end should take us back to the beginning, to create a loop.
2. Bring these images into Photoshop as unique layers and, using the animation palette, adjust the timing for the loop. Here is a detailed tutorial.
3. Click save for web & devices. You’ll need to save this as a GIF. You should decrease the quality a bit, and resize it to maybe 500 px wide — otherwise the file will be huge.
4. Post this GIF to your blog. Make sure you insert the media at 100%.