1. Tyler Webb
Harold Blanco
CI 350-201
February 24, 2015
Digital Imaging Assignment
For this assignment we were asked to edit an image using photoshop and make it relevant
to our unit plan. For my unit plan I am doing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.
Because there have been film adaptations to the novel I figured that I would incorporate that
somehow into my project. I will explain some of the reasons why I placed in these certain images
and why I chose these images.
The Great Gatsby is arguably one of the best novels of the 20th century and also my own
personal favorite. Because the novel is so well known the cover of the book is also well known,
which is why I chose the cover of the novel to be my background. I also hate whenever movie
posters or movie trailers give away too much about the movie/book so for that reason I left the
overall image very plain. I really wanted to incorporate Gatsby’s house into the image just
because it’s so well described in the book and is the location of all of his extravagant parties. For
that reason I found an image online of Gatsby’s house from the newer movie, made the image
sixe much smaller so that it would fit nicely at the bottom and used one of my favorite photo
shop tools, the magnetic lasso, and went around the edges of the image. After that was completed
I copied and pasted the mansion onto a new layer, allowing me to only move what was on that
layer without disturbing the rest of the image, and moved the image into place.
Because of Gatsby’s extravagant parties he often would have fireworks during dance
numbers or at the end of his parties. In the newer Great Gatsby movie it’s one of my favorite
2. scenes. For that reason I wanted to add fireworks behind the mansion. I found multiple images of
fireworks to place behind the mansion, using the magic eraser I erased most of the black color
that surrounded the fireworks and copied and pasted them into the image. I actually used two
different firework pictures just to let the fireworks look a lot fuller, because after using the magic
eraser they looked a little small. But putting two of them together made them look really nice and
full. I also placed one of the fireworks lower than the others and because of that I wanted the
firework to still have its “tail” so I found another firework with a tail and placed it inside the
lowest one, giving it a feeling of a real firework. I also changed some of the brightness level of
the fireworks to make them really pop against the dark blue background.
One of the last pieces of the image I thought to put in was Gatsby himself, in the recent
remake Leonardo DiCaprio played Gatsby so I thought he would fit well in the image. It also
works well because the image quality was much better than the Robert Redford era Gatsby,
which allowed the image to look better overall. I once again used a new layer and went around
Gatsby with the magnetic lasso to make it easier to get the image I wanted and not miss
anything. After I got the image I wanted I copied and pasted into a new layer and moved Gatsby
where I thought it would look the best in the image overall. The actual picture of Gatsby is
whenever he’s at one of his famous parties and he’s toasting the narrator, Nick Carraway. The
reason I picked this image was because of the other little pieces of the picture, his mansion
famous for his parties and the fireworks also famous at his parties, so it would only make sense
to put in a picture of Gatsby at his party.
I adjusted a lot of the colors after I put in the last touches on where I wanted everything
to go. Changing the brightness, saturation, contrast, and some of the RGB color scale to make it
look the way I wanted it to. After I got it to where I wanted it I thought about adding a quote
3. somewhere on the cover, since some books and movies have a famous quote from the book or
movie on the cover, but decided against it when it didn’t seem to go well with the image as a
whole. I decided not to flatten the image since I may have to go back and make changes,
allowing me not to have to start over, but to just continue where I left off.
