IAP23 Cut and Paste: Composite Image-Making with Photoshop

This course provides an introduction to Photoshop with the goal of developing techniques for composite image-making. No prior experience with Photoshop is necessary.

Technical topics covered include non-destructive layer-based editing, color correction, curves and histogram manipulation, layer blending, masking and selection techniques, and basic image transformations. By examining artists who work with composite imagery, the course will also look at the ways compositing has been used in photography, from early combination printing, to photomontage, to the use of appropriated imagery and archive-mining in contemporary art.

Students may choose to bring their own digital images to use in the course, or may choose to make work by appropriating imagery from online corpuses, some of which will be discussed in the first class. A laptop capable of running Adobe Photoshop is required for the course. MIT affiliates may download Photoshop for free through MIT’s Adobe Creative Cloud license.