I was away during this class, but Pierre visited and did a Photoshop demo. As we learn more about working with Photoshop, you may notice some terms that you aren’t familiar with. Here are some you should know about.

Screen resolution refers to a setting on your computer which determines the number of pixels displayed on your screen. Setting your computer to a higher screen resolution gives you more space to work with, but will usually make interface elements such as icons and text smaller. Most LCD monitors have a native resolution which is the optimal setting for that monitor, as the number of pixels shown on screen matches the display resolution of the monitor.

Anti-aliasing is used in raster imaging software to make lines and curves look smoother – for example, if you draw a black line on a white background with the Brush tool, and then zoom in, you will notice that the edge of the line is made up of grey pixels.

When working in Photoshop, remember to save your work in Photoshop (PSD) or TIFF format, so that your layers will be preserved. Your digital camera files and images that you find on the web will usually be in JPG format, which is a very widely used image format. However, when you are working on a project, saving your working files as JPG is a bad idea, because JPG is a lossy format. Lossy means that image quality is compromised in order to make the files take up less disk space. This means that every time you edit and save a JPG, the image is compressed, which results in a loss of information (and therefore image quality). Compression artifacts are distortions in an image that result from too much compression.

Working with Photoshop often involves working with photos – modifying, manipulating, or mashing them together. You can use your own photos, but sometimes you will want to find other sources of photos to work with.

The web is a limitless source of images – you are probably familiar with Google Image Search. However, when searching for photos which you intend to make use of in your own work, it is a good idea to try to find images that you have permission to use. A good way to do this is to search for images that are public domain or are licensed for reuse.

Public domain refers to intellectual work (such as writing and art) for which the property rights have expired or been forfeited, which means that anyone is free to use the work as they please.

You may have heard of Creative Commons, which is a way for creative people to specify how they want to allow their work to be reused. Some Creative Commons works can be used without restrictions, while others are free for non-commercial use only, or require attribution. Flickr has a Creative Commons page with links to images licensed in this way. You can also use Google Advanced Image Search to restrict your search to images that are labelled for reuse.

Here are some other sources of high-quality images that you can use:

• morgueFile is a “public image archive for creatives by creatives”.
• The Library of Congress’s American Memory collection focusses on American historical images, but contains others as well, such as the map of Placentia Bay above.
• Pixabay is a collection of high-quality public domain photos.
• Wikimedia Commons is a huge repository of media files which anyone can use.
• Wikipedia: Public domain image resources contains an extensive list of links to archives of public domain images, including historical photos and paintings.
• Public Domain Sherpa has a great list of sources of public domain photos.
• WebMuseum has many high-quality images of famous artworks.
• Ars Publik is a limited but high-quality collection of public-domain images.

In Class 9, we had a group critique for Assignment 2. There were a lot of good comments during this critique, and I thought more of you were actively participating, which is great! Some interesting words came up during the critique, too. Here are some of them:

The Tyndall Effect is a scientific term referring to the phenomenon of light scattering by particles in a fine suspension. During the critique it came up as a way of describing dust particles in a beam of light, but it turns out that this definition is incorrect, as the Wikipedia article points out: “Occasionally the term Tyndall effect is incorrectly applied to light scattering by macroscopic dust particles in the air. However, this is more like reflection, not scattering, as the macroscopic particles become clearly visible in the process.”

Bokeh describes the way a camera lens renders out-of-focus points of light. This effect is most noticeable in photos with a very shallow depth of field. Some camera lenses create more aesthetically pleasing bokeh than others.

Albedo is a way of measuring the reflective power of a surface. It is used to describe the brightness of the moon and other astronomical bodies.

Kireji refers to the “cutting word” used in haiku to separate two different images. It is “a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.”

During the crit we were also trying to find out if there was a word for the small utensils used to hold corn on the cob. I couldn’t find one… they seem to be just called corn holders, corn handles, or corn skewers. Check out A Word A Day for a daily dose of random vocabulary!

Digital imaging refers to using computers to create and work with images. Early experiments with computer art in the 1960s often used plotters, which are printers which specifically print vector images. For some interesting examples, see Plotter Drawings on the Digital Art Museum website.

As computers continue to become more important in work, communication, and daily life, more and more artists find themselves working with digital technology. Think about how important computers have become to photographers and video artists over the past ten years. Even artists who do not create work directly on the computer use computers and the internet to research, communicate, and publicize their work. So learning to work with computers as part of your art practice is useful, even if you do not see yourself as a “digital artist”.

Digital imaging is used in many other fields besides artmaking. For example, digital imaging technology is very important for designers, photographers, cartographers, journalists, doctors, engineers, and many other professionals.

In this class, we will look at digital imaging as it is used for making art. You can think of digital imaging as part of a larger field of art called new media. Instead of traditional art media such as painting and sculpture, new media artists work with emerging technology to make art. Besides digital imaging, new media includes media such as video art and video installation, sound art, digital animation, interactive art and internet art, physical computing and electronics, art using computer code, biotechnology art, and even virtual art. Because it involves technology which is evolving quickly, the definition of new media is always changing. The Canada Council for the Arts defines new media as “Artworks that use multimedia, computers or communications technologies in creative expression”.

Digital imaging is an intuitive place to get started making art with computers, because you can use your drawing, painting, photography skills to create digital art. As the class progresses, we’ll look at other ways to make digital art, using the web, video and animation, and even working with computer code. Digital artists are doing a lot of interesting and exciting things. New media does not have the vast history of traditional media like painting or sculpture – it is really a whole new world.