Exploring Aviary

Felipe Gacharna
- ITA Tech Instructor -

For the October 22nd ITA session, students had the option to join a choice session that explored Aviary. Aviary is a free online set of tools that allow for image editing and creation as well as music editing and creation. In particular, students got to explore the Phoenix photo editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop, the Raven vector editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator, the Myna music creator, similar to Sony ACID, and the Peacock effects editor, which is unlike most programs the students have experienced before in ITA.

All the Aviary software runs in a browser and is free for anyone to use! We used the specialized education version to great success, which allowed us to oversee much of what the students were able to accomplish in this session.

This student was very proud of the work she could do to her photo in a web browser software:

Phoenix (like Photoshop)


Phoenix has many of the same features that students have already learned in Photoshop, including layers, blending modes, filters, and the clone stamp tool, to name a few. In Phoenix, students got to play around with a base image of a hot air balloon that I provided.

Using the hot air balloon image, students were able to duplicate some of the functionality they are familiar with in Photoshop and then take it to another level with the Peacock effects editor.

Peacock (a unique photo editing tool)

You can "push" a layer from Phoenix directly to Peacock, edit the layer in Peacock, and then send it back to Phoenix. Here are some pictures of the edited hot air balloon image as well as a screen shot of the Peacock editor, showing the unique user interface.

These edited balloon images showcase some of what you can do with Phoenix and Peacock.

This screenshot of Peacock shows the "node-based user interface" that the tool uses. It's a rather unique user interface (UI) where the user is provided with "nodes" or blocks which they can manipulate. Nodes can be connected through the little "notches" on the top and on the bottom of each. These "notches" are inputs and outputs. Manipulating the inputs and outputs to each node allows for heavy manipulation of images, and since each node has its own properties that can also be manipulated, the user has a lot of power in creating a desired effect.

Here's another screenshot of Peacock showing the nodes more clearly and some manipulation done to a gradient.

Myna (sort of like Sony ACID or a drum machine)

The Myna music creator allowed students to mix sounds from a large library to create beats. Myna provides a simple interface, with several layers of different sounds and each sound having a track, with beats being on or off for a given beat. Volume can be tuned for each sound as well as for each particular beat, so students have a good amount of power in mixing their beats. Here is a screenshot of one of the beats created by a student as well as an over-the-shoulder picture of one of the students working on his Myna project.

Listen to some beats the students made:







Aviary also provides a Hall of Fame where anyone can look through submissions, as ranked by users. Most of the time, the projects actually allow you to open up the program used to create it so that users can view how the project was created. Students had an opportunity to look through the Hall of Fame to see what could be done with the tools they were using and to help them gather ideas of how they could achieve some effects in their final artifacts by looking through the projects that allowed you to see how they were created.

Senioritis? Not With These ITA Seniors.

Almost half way through the class of 2011's last year at ITA, the seniors are showing no signs of lack of motivation, procrastination, drop in lab performance, or "coasting" through the afternoon. These symptoms more commonly known as senioritis fail to be observed at ITA with this year's excellent students. The students have already shared their proposals for their project at the Holiday Luncheon. For those of you who could not attend, here is a brief re-cap of what the seniors are doing.

Protein Tubar Video by Thor and Thuy Dan

Thor and Thuy Dan are working with Professor Dave Nelson from the department of biochemistry here on campus. They taped an instructional video of Professor Nelson using the Tubar Protein Modeling Kit for SMART teams at Madison West High School. SMART Teams stand for Students Modeling A Research Topic, an extra-curricular activity that introduces high school students to the field of biomolecular research. This video will be used for teachers in the program as a demo of how to use Tubar Kits.

Flash Animations by Eddie and Jeremy

Eddie and Jeremy are creating complex Flash Animations for Professor Sebastian Bednarek of the department of biochemistry. From the pictures on the side you can see their drawing progress thus far. Eddie is working on cell membrane trafficking (on the left) and Jeremy is working on clathrin mediated endocytosis (on the right).

Scientific Demos by Noah and Maya

Noah and Maya are taping scientific demos for the biochemistry course "Exploring the Biomolecular World" taught by Professors Dave Nelson and Michael Patrick. The two scientific demos that Noah and Maya will be filming is a short video on the hydrophobic effect and an experiemnt using Beta-Galactoside.

ITA Recap by Adrianne, Lakoye, and Jasmine

Adrianne, Lakoye, and Jasmine will be using iMovie to create short video presentations about past ITA projects. These projects will be displayed for recruitment and funding meetings to demonstrate the great work done at ITA.

Video Tape of the Crystallography Research Facility

Students will be working with one of the post graduate students working with Professor Katrina Forest. Professor Forest uses x-ray crystallography in her research to study the interactions between humans and microbes. our students' task will be to record a 45 minute video of the entire process.

Interviews of Campus Professors

Students will be venturing to different research laboratories on campus to interview professors about their work. The video's goal will be to inform undergraduate students about the various research on campus to help aid them in choosing which lab to join. The first professor the students will be interviewing is Douglas Weibel from the Department of Biochemistry.

Tutorial on Jmol by Leija and Ivan

Ivan and Leija will be using CamStudio to help record a tutorial of how to use Jmol, a protein modeling software program. They will be recording an expert in Jmol give an instructional lesson of how to use the program and then distribute this video to various science professors on campus.

Holiday Greeting Cards by Ashanti and Julie

Ashanti and Julie are using Adobe Photoshop to create custom-made greeting cards for the UW-Madison Children's Hospital. They will be printing out their designs and hand delivering them in the upcoming months.

ITA Digital Yearbook by Eileen and Kiran

Eileen and Kiran will be creating the second ITA digital yearbook. The yearbook will include fun facts about each ITA student and highlight the events from this past year. Currently, the two are in the process of taking the ITA student yearbook pictures and designing a new layout in Adobe InDesign.

Congratulations Seniors!!! Keep up the great work!

Understanding Exposure Settings on DSLR's

During the choice session on October 23rd, Felipe, with Chris and Tenzin K. supporting, taught students about the basics of exposure on Digital SLR Canon Powershot Cameras.

The first period started off with a brief introduction with a mini-ice breaker.

Following that, the instructors had the students take a quiz on Learn@UW about proper camera handling. The students were required to read a couple of paragraphs detailing the information and then had to answer six questions about what they read. If they did not achieve 100%, they had to take the test again or explain to an instructor the particular question they got wrong so that the instructors could see if the student understood the information.

After the quiz was done, the really fun stuff started! Felipe talked about the basics of exposure, emphasizing the components of the Exposure Triangle, and how the three aspects--aperture, shutter speed, and ISO--must be used in unison to obtain a correctly-exposed picture.

After going over the information, cameras were handed out. Each student got their own Canon PowerShot camera to experiment with. Felipe talked about proper handling, how the case must be sitting on a flat, sturdy surface before you unzip it and take the camera out so the camera doesn't fall to the ground.

He showed them how to hold the camera, with the strap around their necks, hands on the grip and beneath the camera for support. The different cameras modes were then covered.

Felipe talked about the M, Av, Tv, and P modes on the camera, what each one does, what you can control, etc. The students then went on a 10 minute break.

After break, everyone grabbed their cameras, Felipe grabbed two stuffed animals he brought for subjects, and the class headed out to the entrance with the ramp facing Union South.

Once at the ramp, Felipe decided that the class would start by taking pictures above the entrance, on the ledge with the plants next to the big windows. Because of the open ledge, the stairs, the hallways, and different things around the area, students got creative with their points of view and perspectives. They also had each other as subjects as well as some plants and the stuffed animals.

It happened that there were some construction workers outside, so they also became the focus of some pictures. A few students asked to go outside, since it had stopped raining, and were able to take pictures outside for a little bit, with Chris.

Inside, some of the students seemed to particularly enjoy taking pictures of the stuffed animals from unique perspectives, like from below, putting the stuffed animal on top of the entrance and taking a picture from the ground underneath. Anny and Leroy got on the same level of the stuffed animals, laying down flat on the ground to get pictures that way. Briana took some pictures with very unique perspectives, like laying the camera against the wall facing up, or putting one of the stuffed animals on the stairs and shooting it from the bottom of the stairs.

The students had a very positive reaction to the choice session. A lot of them went as far as posting some of the images they took to their personal Facebook pages!
Following are some images taken during the sessions showing the students working.






















~written 10/23/2010

Photoshop Actions and Scripts

For the first 3 sessions of IT Academy Labs, this fall, we offered several CUSTOM WORKSHOPS designed by individual instructors on staff. Chris Spears, one of our seasoned Photoshop experts, offered a workshop entitled, Photoshop Actions and Scripts.

Photoshop Actions and Scripts was a workshop all about increasing project productivity in Photoshop. Actions and scripts are very useful, but are very commonly and easily overlooked. They make the most tedious job, the most simple to-do in a matter of seconds, and you have the option to use ones provided, create your own, or download ones that other people have created!

The first session served mostly as an introduction to the concept and functionality of actions and scripts. The second session was centered a bit more around actions. And, the third and final session was all about using both actions and scripts together in different projects.

Being the first time ITA had offered the Custom Workshops, Session 1 of Photoshop Actions and Scripts had started off a bit slow. As stated above, this was an introductory session which served primarily as the introduction of the concepts behind actions and scripts as tools used for increasing project productivity so it was not very project oriented. It was more of a chance for students to get familiar with learning how to use and incorporate these two aspects of Photoshop in different kinds of projects. This included:

• creating and recording steps
• saving actions
• reading scripts and reading through action steps
• downloading scripts and actions from trusted sites

Nonetheless, the students seemed to be really amazed at how the actions and scripts were carried out and how much they could accomplish in such a short amount of time once they were ran.

By the end of the session the students had a couple of different projects they finished; one project was from a batch rename script, which re-names all your files for you using a systematic approach. One was from an action they downloaded from the internet and loaded into Photoshop (these varied), and their last one was from an action they created/recorded themselves (these also varied).

Check out some of the student examples!

Session 2 was a lot more interesting for the students, as it was much more project-oriented. We think the students got a better idea this session of what can really be done with scripts and actions in Photoshop, after having the necessarily somewhat slow-paced introduction to them.

First, we started off with a quick review from last session just about the main purpose of actions and scripts and their many uses. Then, we jumped right into the first project which was "Reading" actions--this project consisted of downloading an action of a cool effect from the internet (http://www.turningturnip.co.uk/photoshop/photoshop-actions/photo-box-action.php), loading it into Photoshop, viewing its contents and recorded steps, and then finally attempting to re-create the cool effect using the action as a step-by-step guided tutorial. While this was a bit tedious, it provided a great way to REALLY understand how these things work!

The purpose of this project was to get students more familiar with the process and order at which actions may be recorded, and also to get more familiar with the Photoshop interface and different tools and such, as they encountered many new terms for different Photoshop tools and processes through reading the recorded steps of the action. Unfortunately, the lead instructor, Chris, didn't notice that this particular action in order to achieve this cool effect was entirely TOOOO long to "read" in its entirety. So about a third of the way through reading the action, Chris decided to just stop and had the class hit the "play" button to finish it up... it was well worth the wait though, as the students got to delve deep into the script for a while, and then they were very relieved to be able to stop early.

Next, the students created their own actions which they saved to their folders for other students to load up and attempt to "read" themselves to see if they could get the same effects (although most of them probably just hit the "play" button to speed up the process...which is what the workshop was all about anyways so the students clearly grasped that concept quite nicely).

The final session began with a review in the form of a walk-through project called "Clipping Mask Collage." The students really enjoyed this project and were very satisfied with their results. This, again, was a way to give the students a bit more experience with creating longer actions and getting a better feel for the idea that not all steps that one may take to create a project in Photoshop can be recorded with actions (such as the Brush Tool), and also that sometimes there needs to be a specific order to how you record your actions in order for them to give the same effect when you run them again on another image.

Check out the examples!

For the remainder of the session the students created their own projects using different actions and scripts (custom, default, and/or downloaded). Here are some examples of their independent Photoshop Actions and Scripts projects from Session 3!

Real and Digital Art: ITA Students Have "Mad Art Skills"!

We started our first session with me (Eliza) showing my artwork and sharing with the students my system for creating it:

I find a digital image, print the image, and then transfer it onto an art board. From there, I paint on it with acrylic paints and then create additional layers by adding collage. I have also been taking photos of the paintings and then continuing to work on the image within Illustrator. Then I print the Illustrator artwork, collage it on to the painting, and continue the process until I am satisfied with the results. Because this process involves both real-space artwork and virtual-space artwork, I have a series of digital images as well as the final painting.

Saint Lucy, by Eliza

For the workshop, I selected a collection of interesting photographs from Shorpy.com. The students could either draw and collage directly on the printed black and white photos, or download the image file and begin altering the image digitally. Then they could print their images, take photos of them, and continue the process using collage.

The first day, students seemed to get a slow start, and on the second day they got going right away and they made rapid progress!

Natalia used the collage technique on a digital image of a child in a forest. It has a fairy tale feel to it.

Jose worked on adding images to a old photo of a woman taking dictation from a Native American chief.

Patrick spent the second day working on an image of a lion. He was swirling out the edges of the lion's body which was giving it an otherworldly quality.

Aubrey was altering a picture of some strange-looking old-fashioned circus people. He added color and pasted some industrial buildings into the skyline.

Tenzin's boxing guys were turning into superheroes and he was planning on adding some effects to make them look like cartoons from the 50s or 60s. 

Leija was combining several different photos, including photos of his friends, to make vampire creatures.

Kim brought some of her own drawings, which she had photographed and wanted to try working with in Adobe Illustrator.

Jeremy's artwork was based on an old photo of a smiling small person.

Eddie's piece shows thoughtful, careful work. He printed out a picture of a kindergarten classroom after the Chernobyl Disaster of 1986. He almost seamlessly transposed a photo of a child from the early 20th Century onto it. He worked really hard to cut out that image of the child and he pasted it on so that it looks like the child is holding the bar of one of the cribs. 

Aubrey's image is impressive too. He added smokestacks and pollution and then colored his whole image to look like a smoggy day.

At the end of the second day, all the students were coming up with very interesting work, and I was really looking forward to watching the images evolve during the third session and to seeing the final results.

On the third day, we began with a quick and very effective lesson by Cristina on how to connect to an ITA network drive, where students could access, store, and share their work. Then, we spent the rest of the day working on our artwork. The students have all created some FANTASTIC pieces: 

Kim had scanned in some of her own artwork at home, then she added a background in Adobe Photoshop and created an interesting cherry blossom design for her figure's clothing.

Kim's Cherry Blossom Kimono Picture

During the second week of class, Patrick unfortunately lost his first lion picture; he had not been saving his work and there was a problem with his computer, so after he rebooted, he was unable to retrieve his really great work. But, he did not let that stop him! He learned from the experience (he was saving constantly while working on his second picture!) and he created ANOTHER AWESOME one, done mostly in Photoshop. He added wings to the lion, and then put the whole figure into a completely different background. I really like the arc of light on the right. Very effective image and fantastic learning experience--way to go Patrick!!

Natalia's Child in the Woods is really fabulous too:

This is not her final product, though, because she has been adding some cut-out collage that really creates some interesting effects . . . those woods have eyes!

Juan finished his image of the Chief and then added some coloring effects on the final product. He used colored pencils on a print out, which he blended with his fingers. This made the surface smooth and glossy, adding an interesting dimension to the picture. After that, he scanned in his entire final product:

Jeremy used Photoshop and added construction paper collage to create a very amusing character:

Tenzin finished his image of two men boxing:

This custom workshop has been a success: everyone learned a lot, had some fun, tried something new, and made a project he or she can be proud of. As an instructor, I found it rewarding to share my own talents with the students and show them how technology can be part of our lives in an interesting and exciting way.