My audio experience

For my audio project, I used Audacity to record an mp3 and then post it on my blog. Although my husband has used Audacity before to record mp3s, I had never used it before and I actually had no idea he'd used this program until after I'd finished my project! I enjoyed learning how to insert music into the audio of me speaking and fade it in and out.

The hardest thing for me with this project was uploading the mp3 and shockwave player to my blog. Although I'd followed the instructions exactly, somewhere in the mix some quotation marks got deleted and that threw me off. I just had to go over everything I did in detail to find where my mistake was. When it finally all worked, I was elated.

I think the whole project was a success in general and I think it would be fun to create podcasts just as a hobby, especially now that I feel like I'm a bit more familiar with how to do it. I learned how to use a new program I was unfamiliar with and one that will be very useful to me as I go throughout my studies and my job. For future projects, Audacity could be useful when recording audio for any online trainings I might be putting together for my job.

Audio

Using Photoshop

For my photoshop assignment, I chose to repair and retouch an image and use an oil paint filter on the photo. Here is the original image.

And here is the finished image.

To retouch the image I followed these steps: 

1. I opened the raw file in camera raw and clicked on the Auto settings. That adjusted the exposure and histogram to better levels. Then, I clicked on the white balance eye dropper tool in Camera Raw and set the white balance by clicking on some of the white snow in the background.
2. Next I opened the photo in photoshop and then duplicated the photo and renamed the second layer “Retouch.”
3. The first thing I did was use the elliptical marquee tool to circle different blemishes on my face and then use the content aware function to fill the blemishes. I also used the spot healing brush and content aware option and the healing brush to clear some smaller blemishes and stray hairs.
4. I used the dodge tool to brighten up some dark spots on my face and also used Gaussian blur to soften the lines, etc around my face. 

On this last photo, I used the oil paint filter in photoshop. I didn't really encounter many obstacles with this activity since I followed some of the online tutorials step-by-step and I feel like I was successful is eliminating many of the blemishes on my face in the original photo. Learning more about photoshop is important to me right now because I love photography and digital art. One of my hobbies is digital scrapbooking and I use photoshop to to put my artwork together. I love learning new shortcuts in photoshop and would love to seamlessly be able to retouch portrait photos. In my future profession, knowing photoshop is very important for editing photos and putting together engaging instruction for whatever type of company I work for.