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Garbage In Garbage Out

by timj351

The idea for this challenge finally hit me, as usual, a few hours before the deadline so I had to work pretty quickly. The concept garbage in garbage out is pretty self explanatory. If you have a bad image or source to begin with your output will be bad also. I started by going through my garbage and laying it out on a black garbage bag on my bedroom floor. I had good sunlight coming through the window from the right so my lighting was taken care of. I used my tripod and took several shots, rearranging some of the garbage as I went. I uploaded the photos and opened the best one in Photoshop.



Photoshop 7.0 has a great filter called Liquify that I used to sqeeze and stretch the garbage. My intention was to enlarge the image to life size but it was quicker to apply the Liquify filter before enlarging the image because the filter is very memory intensive. I enlarged the image to life size and applied some sharpening using the Unsharp Mask then printed it out in 8x10 in. sections which were then cropped and taped together.



This is were I used the 640x480 pixel size to my advantage so that the taped seems would hardly be visible in the final image. I cut out the excess paper so only the shape of the garbage remained then I inserted the stretched end into my printer as shown and placed everything on a dark blanket to match the dark background in the original garbage photo. Unfortunately the sun had now gone down so I had to set up in my dining room and use the ceiling light from the kitchen which seemed adequate. When everything was ready I used my tripod and took several photos. I needed to adjust the Levels slightly but what you see is very close to how the image came out of the camera. Many people thought that I had added real garbage to my fianl scen but I did not. All of the garbage is just a thin piece of paper.

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