Assignment 4: Bill and Spy

I know it seems silly now, although sometimes I think you people just write these books to make us look bad. Like the whole thing was our fault. I tell you, back then, there was nothing more important. It took Bill two months to smuggle the bird out of Cuba, and cost us one of our best operatives. It was Bill's idea. We knew Castro had a weakness for Green Cuban Spotteds. Bill spent hours trying to teach the bird the codes. It would've worked, too, and then no one would have laughed! We heard the parrot was caught when it started to sing the Yale fight song. "Boola boola." You know. We tried to get her out, but it was too late. Poor bird.

Assignment 4.

Image corrected and colorized using Adobe Photoshop.

It must have been getting late when I decided that something alien was going on.

I cleaned up the image and had a photoshop seizure...

Okay, I admit it. This is an experiment that went badly awry. An attempt to do algorithmic colorization without touching a brush.

The idea was to use Gradients-on-Paths to map individual gray levels into matching colors. Loosely select an area, create a clever gradient that maps dark areas into lip gloss, light areas to beautiful skin tones. Create another gradient for hair, another for the shirt, and one for the general background.

The final stroke: a multihued blend for the parrot. I swear, I never touched the bird with a tool. Yet look what happened.

Sigh. Ted Turner does this twenty-four times a second.