Me(me): Not Impressed

Introduction

Hello readers! For this week's blog post, we were assigned the first official rough draft for our meme project using Adobe Photoshop! In this post, I will demonstrate some of the steps I took to complete this rough draft, some of my thoughts about the process, and then show my rough draft at the very end. I hope my learning experience can be useful to any of my fellow Photoshop learners!


Creating a Concept

Being totally transparent, memes are personally not for me. I don't really find them that funny, so finding a concept and really getting into this project was definitely a challenge for me. With that being said, for my meme concept, I took a different approach than a typical meme: I chose a theme. One of my favorite shows is an American tv sitcom called "New Girl." If you haven't seen it and you love funny-drama related shows, I definitely recommend! In this show, one of the main characters, Nick Miller, says and thinks a lot of questionable things throughout the show that are both hilarious and, in my opinion, meme-worthy. So, I took the liberty of creating my sarcasm-driven rendition of the "imagination" Spongebob meme. Although Spongebob has made this style meme popular, and it is the inspiration of this particular meme, sarcasm has been around for ages, and is the main idea I am trying to evoke here with this meme. That, and of course the very satirically thought provoking statement made through the text.


Process

The first step of creating my meme was developing an idea, and finding useful images. Once I had my concept that I explained earlier, finding pictures was the easy part. From there I imported them into Photoshop and began the real work. I started with the image of Nick Miller first. Using the magic wand select tool, I sculpted the general area in which I wanted to keep selected to be transferred into the background image. Then, using the lasso tool, I better refined some of the areas I was missing, as according to Adobe the lasso tool "tries to find image edges and automatically stops the selection there." (Adobe 2016) This, paired with the quick selection tool helped me greatly in getting a precise cut out of Nick. Although I do want to note that after a while, I found the lasso tool to be slightly more time consuming. To make sure no spots were missed, I toggled the alt/option key and clicked on the mask screen to show me a black and white cutout of the exact work I was doing. I definitely recommend doing this to allow for pristine precision!


Next, I repeated these steps with the rainbow. Then, when uploading these masks into the background photo, I converted them into smart objects. Also in this step I used command T to adjust the images to "fine-tune" and fit my work space properly. (Adobe 2021) Once I added the texts with a drop shadow, I then realized there were a lot of colors going on. So, I altered the levels of the overall meme in its own adjustment layer to lower the vividness of the color. Another thing I did with the rainbow specifically was change its opacity, and I did this in its own tab, saved it, and then because of the smart object, the opacity change was altered in the overall meme as well. I have to say, the smart object tool has to be my favorite, it is really a lifesaver!


Final Thoughts

Looking back on this rough draft, I know I put a ton of hard work, time, and thought into this project, despite my initial disinterest. Additionally, I think this meme is very representative of me and the things I enjoy, and I am happy I got to express that through this project. In the future, I definitely want to maybe add some scholarly-looking items onto Nick Miller, and some sparkles to the rainbow, just to add to the satire of the overall message. I also want to stress some important things I learned and will be taking with me as this project progresses: smart objects can change your life, the quick selection tool is arguably better and more efficient than the lasso tool, and adjusting the colors/brightness of the image after the fact is a lot easier than trying to edit each photo individually and piecing them together. With all that in mind, I think it will definitely take you less time to create these memes than it took me while learning! I hope you took away something useful today, and I hope you enjoyed Nick Miller's questionable view on the trustworthiness of banks!





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