• any target
• churches in texas
• abandoned 7/11’s
• your bedroom at 5 am
• hospitals at midnight
• warehouses that smell like dust
• lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore
• empty parking lots
• ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods
• rooftops in the early morning
• inside a dark cabinet
playgrounds at night
rest stops on highways
deep in the mountains
early in the morning wherever it’s just snowed
trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic
schools during breaks
those little beaches right next to ferry docks
bowling alleys
unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips
your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep
laundromats at midnight
what the fuck
galeries in art museums that are empty except for you
the lighting section of home depot
stairwells
•hospital waiting rooms
•airports from midnight to 7am
• bathrooms in small concert venues
I just got the weirdest feeling I swear
OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!
A lot of these places are called liminalspaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.
The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.
Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.
I, for one, appreciate your passion for liminal spaces and thank you for explaining it to the rest of us.
Okay, I love everything about this, but is anyone gonna talk about why Target is on the list? I’m not saying it doesn’t belong there, I’m just wondering. Since it’s neither a
liminal space nor a place out of context.
Since last October when the Pitchfork Unsung feature on me was first released, I have received an overwhelming amount of messages and emails asking for the “Tame Impala Photoshop Tutorial” I talk about sending to a young boy’s father in Taiwan. It’s a good story, but the way the video is edited and my unfortunate choice of the word ‘tutorial’ instead of ‘email’ makes it seem like more than it really is. I simply sent a short email outlining my techniques, most of which are explained in the Pitchfork video. Because I have received so many requests- below is a basic explanation of my techniques that aren’t discussed in the video.
I think I explain the masking and airbrush enough in the video, but the most important detail not outlined is the use of Filter->Pixelate->Pointillize to achieve the grain. People assume I use Filter->Noise->Add Noise, but I rarely use that as it’s way too fine. I always work at 300dpi in RGB colorspace with CMYK Proof Colors turned on (dpi and color settings greatly change the look of filters and blend modes, and everything is converted to CMYK before print) and apply the textures at the very end. I usually finish the composition and colors and then copy a merged version of all layers and paste that as the very top layer and then apply Pixelate->Pointillize with the foreground color set to black and background color set to white, usually at size 3, but sometimes higher if I want the grain to be bigger. I then desaturate that layer and set the layer blend mode to Soft Light or Overlay depending on how severe I want the effect to be. I usually adjust the brightness and contrast of this layer to get things dialed in.
In addition to the Pointilize filter, I have a collection of paper and print textures I have scanned from old books and magazines that I use as overlay layers (always desaturated and adjusted to be as close to 50% gray as possible). There are always several layers at the top of my files effecting the layers below. I view this like mixing or mastering music, a final process to blend everything together and make things mesh and seem less digital, despite being made entirely in the computer.
I also use a totally convoluted system to achieve the colors. Often I work on something in a completely arbitrary color pallette and adjust the colors with a combination of Hue/Saturation and Color Balance adjustment layers or with solid colors set with different opacity and blend modes.
You can see in the image below the Tame Impala “Currents” cover with and without these adjustment layers and color overlays and how the look is drastically different. Without the overlay layers it looks very digital- cold and clean, and you can see the colors I worked with are completely different.
I’m constantly experimenting and changing the way I do things, and I encourage others to figure out their own way to get what they’re looking for. There is no right or wrong way to do things in Photoshop and it’s taken me years of experimentation to figure out how to achieve what I want to do. I wish I could respond to every question I receive, but there are just too many, so hopefully anyone interested in how I do things will find this post.
And feel free to tag me in any experiments you make using tips from this post!
