"Looking North" was created using Adobe Photoshop 2.5 running on an Apple Quadra 950 with 53 megabytes of RAM, the Power Macintosh Upgrade Card, two 1 gigabyte internal drives and a Mirror 600 Color scanner.
I began by digitizing one of my own black and white photographs in grayscale at 266 pixels per inch in two halves then put the halves together and adjusted the brightness and contrast in the scan using the Levels dialogue box. Next I sharpened the image using the Unsharp Mask filter at 50% and proceeded to clean up the scan by removing artifacts, dust etc. In the upper left hand there was a part of a house in the frame that I decided to remove using the cloning tool. Next I converted the file from Grayscale to RGB and began adding color to the lower half of the image by creating masks using the lasso tool and using the Fill command set to color only at an opacity of approximately 20%. Next I masked off the sky including the trees and pasted in a mackerel sky from one of my color slides at an opacity of about 35%. Using the Hue and Saturation dialogue box I adjusted the color. Then I scanned in a piece of painted paper and pasted that into the sky at a low opacity and adjusted the color. At this point I decided that I needed more trees so I cloned several new trees from pieces of the ones that were already there. After that I worked on the building coloring it and masking off parts for adjustments to sharpness, brightness and contrast. Finally I used the cropping tool to fine tune the edges.
The print on display in this exhibition was made on an Iris printer by Nash Editions on Rives BFK paper.
Jeffrey Becton
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