Friday, April 26, 2013

Posters

For the last assignment  of my Photoshop class we were assigned to create 2 posters. One with a theme of Creativity and the other with a theme of "Keep Going". I created the below posters.

For the keep going poster,  I used a photo that I took of the moon and a quote that i made up, to go with it.
For the creativity poster, I chose a inspirational quote on creativity. I used a broken glass special effect to create the look that the quote was glass that had been dropped. Which could go along with the mistake part of the quote.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

How does a font speak to you?

Assignment: Choose a font and illustrate how is speaks and feels. For instance Zapfino make be ballet dancers gracefully twirling across the page, whereby Impact is a bolder cracking the very floor upon which it sits. Do Not Illustrate the name of the font, illustrate its voice and its feeling.  Fonts are the voice with which our work speaks. This project is designed to help you explore the voice with which you speak.

Project Brief: I chose to illustrate a font called Monkey Wishes that I found on dafont.com. As soon as I saw the font, I thought of a child's writing. I used my 5 year old son practicing his writing to help illustrate my font. I used the clone stamp tool to erase his actual writing on the paper and replaced it with the font.





Project Time Sheet:
Research: 40 mins
Photography: 15 mins
Image Editing: 1.5 hrs
Typography: 30 min
Printing: 20 mins
Mounting: 10 mins
Presenting to class: 10 min

The Tourist Movie Poster

Assignment: Recreate a movie poster using your own imagery.

Project Brief: I chose The Tourist as my movie to recreate. I used my husband and I as the stand ins for Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.  I photographed Dennis (my husband) first. than used the timer feature on my point and shoot to photograph myself. I than cleaned up the images  little bit and used the lasso tool to cut each of us out and place on my poster. 


My Version
Actual Poster





















Project Time sheet
Research: 35 mins
Photography: 20 mins
Image Editing: 2 hrs
Typography: 1 hr
Printing: 20 mins

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Scrapbooking with Zanette Magazine Cover

Assignment: Create a magazine cover using the layout of a existing magazine, using your own imagery and text.

Project Brief: I chose to create a scrapbooking magazine using Australian Scrapbooking Memories Magazine as my layout inspiration. I used a photo of a scrapbook page from my own scrapbook. I decided to title the magazine Scrapbooking with Zanette and center the content of the magazine around scrapbooking with me.:)


     I spent about 3.5 hours, from research to print, on this project. I created my cover in Adobe Photoshop. I used the polygonal lasso tool to cut out the background of my scrapbook page than placed that on a lime green background. I chose for my cover background to be this color because I was aiming to bring out the green that is in the scrapbook page. I created the bar code using a free font from dafont.com. I chose to make the feature article an exclusive look into my Scrap Cave because I do plan on giving a look into my Scrap Cave on my other blog. That post will be up once my new desk is delivered. :)

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Learn The Language Of Design

     To be successful in the design industry, you need to know the language.  As with any industry, design has its own meanings for certain words. Here is some helpful vocabulary. This will probably become a series of posts, but for now here is 100 helpful vocab.

  1. Pixel- A pixel is the most basic component of digital color. Pixel is a combination of the words picture and element. Pixels are two dimensional, they only have a height and dept. They are square-shaped bits of light that have no specific size. The size of a pixel is determined by their function and use. Pixels are lined up in rows, called rasters, rows and rows of rasters form the actual image.
  2. Color Space- Color space is a color, and all its hues, values, and saturations.
  3. RGB- RGB stands for red, green, and blue. This is a color mode that is used primarily for designs that will not be printed. There are 16M colors in the RGB color mode.
  4. CMYK- CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. This is the color mode used for printed designs.There are 16K colors int he CMYK color mode.
  5. LAB- LAB stands for Luminescence Alpha Beta. LAB is a device- independent color model created in 1931 as a international standard for measuring color.
  6. Dynamic range- Dynamic range refers to the ratio between the maximum and minimum  measurable light intensities.
  7. Curves- Curves is a adjustment in Photoshop. The curves tool can take tones and selectively stretch or compress them. Curves affects the tones and contrast.
  8. Levels- Levels is a adjustment in Photoshop, it can move and stretch the brightness, contrast and tonal ranges by specifying what is complete black, complete white and the mid tones in a histogram.
  9. Exposure- Exposure is a adjustment in Photoshop, it adjusts the amount of light that is seen in a image.
  10. Tonal Range- Tonal range refers to the range of tones between the lightest and darkest areas of a  image.
  11.  White Balance- White balance is the process of removing color casts. This makes objects that appear white in person, appear white in your photo.
  12. Color Balance- Color balance is the global adjustment of the of the colors. Usually of the red, green and blues.
  13. Channels- Channels are divisions of color data within a digital image. The data is separated into prime and secondary colors.
  14. Photo Filter- Photo filter is a feature in Photoshop the allows a user to adjust the color balance and apply a hue adjustment to a image
  15. Shadows/Highlights- Shadows/Highlights is a tool in Photoshop that allows you to bring out details in the shadow and highlight areas of an image that were too dark or light to see.
  16. High Dynamic Range Photography- High dynamic range is a picture type that is capable of storing 32 bits per color channel. This makes a photo with a much bigger possible brightness range than found in 16- or 8- bit per channel photos. You can create a HDR image in Photoshop with the merge to HDR feature.
  17. Saturation- Saturation is the intensity or purity of a hue. Another way to think of it is as the brightness or dullness of a color.
  18. Contrast- Contrast is the difference in the brightness between the darkest and lightest areas of the image.
  19. Clarity- Clarity is a tool in Photoshop that allows you to boost the local and mid tone contrast.
  20. Vibrance- Vibrance is a tool used to adjust saturation in all lower-saturated colors with less effect on higher-saturated colors, so that clipping is minimized as colors reach full saturation. Vibrance also prevents skin-tones from becoming over saturated.
  21. Hue- A hue is the name of a color. (For example: red, green, or blue.)
  22. Brightness- Brightness is a adjustment tool used to brighten images.
  23. Spot Color- Spot color is any color generated by a ink (pure or mixed) that is printed using a single run in offset printing.
  24. Pantone Color- Pantone color is a proprietary formula of inks or pigments used in printing and manufacturing to insure accuracy and consistency.
  25. Complimentary Color- Complimentary colors are colors that are opposite hues of each other. The would be located directly across from each other on a color wheel.
  26. Triadic Color Scheme- Triadic color scheme is where you use three colors that are evenly spaced on the color wheel.
  27. Rule of Thirds- The rule of thirds is where you imagine that your image has 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines on it that creates nine equal segments of the image, than you place the most important object of the image along those lines.
  28. Golden Ratio- The golden ratio is when you have the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one.
  29. Golden Spiral- The golden spiral is a spiral that as it grows get wider by a factor of Phi for every quarter turn it makes.
  30. Fibonacci Series- Fibonacci Series is a pattern of numbers where the next number is found bu adding the two numbers before it.
  31. Blending Modes- Blending modes is a formula used for defining the mixing of a layer with those beneath it.
  32. Multiply- Multiply is mode in Photoshop that takes all the color information in each channel and multiplies the base color by blend color.
  33. Color Burn- Color burn is one of Photoshop's blending modes, it burns the color of the upper layer with the lower layer.
  34. Burn- Burn is a tool in Photoshop that allows you to darken pixels that you paint.
  35. Dodge- Dodge is a tool in Photoshop that allows you to lighten pixels that you paint.
  36. Screen- Screen is a blending tool in Photoshop that allows you to lighten images.
  37. Color Dodge- Color dodge is a blending mode in Photoshop that allows you to create light effects,
  38. Overlay- Overlay is a blending mode that multiplies or screens the colors based on the base color. The base color is not replaced but mixed with the blend color to reflect the lightness or darkness of the original color.
  39. Soft Light- Soft light is a blending mode in Photoshop that blends the base color and the blend colors and darkens or lightens the resulting color in relation to the tonality of the blend color.
  40. Luminosity- Luminosity is the appearance of light in a color.
  41. Color Blending Mode- Color blend mode is used to colorize black and white images. This allows you to add color to the image without affecting the lightness values
  42. Opacity- Opacity is the degree of non-transparency.
  43. Fill- Fill is a tool in Photoshop that allows you to fill a selected object, area, or layer with color.
  44. Layer Styles- Layer styles is the The combination of effects on any given layer in Photoshop.
  45. Bevel/Emboss- Bevel and emboss are tools that allow you to create contour and texture by adding highlights and shadows to create a 3-D look.
  46. Drop Shadow- Drop shadows are shadows that give you object depth and make it stand out. 
  47. .jpg- .jpg is short for JPEG, which stands for Joint Photography Expert Group. A .jpg is a type of compressed file. It is the most universal image file.
  48. .tiff- TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. TIFF is a high quality format the supports colors from 1- 24 bit. TIFF is made to be a standard image format for storing high quality color images on multiple platforms. TIFF allows layering and transparency.
  49. .raw- Raw doesn't stand for anything, it refers to being unaltered. .raw indicted that the file was read directly from a camera.
  50. .gif- GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. GIF was one of the first two image formats for the Internet. It allows transparency but only 100% or 0%.
  51. .png- PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. This is another file format that allows transparency like GIF, but you can pick what percent of transparency you would like. PNG is a compressed format.
  52. File Compression- File compression is basically making a file smaller, it is commonly used when sending a file from one computer to another. The compression makes the file smaller there for sends quicker.
  53. File Optimization- File optimization is the reduction of the file's size to improve compatibility with the Internet.
  54. Meta File- A meta file is a file that can store multiple types of data. These files can contain raster, vector and type data.
  55. Raster- Raster means that the graphic or image is constructed of pixels
  56. Vector- Vector means that the graphic or image is a free form object or pixel free, it can therefore be resized without becoming blurry or pixelated
  57. Color Temperature- Color temperature is a characteristic of visible light that has important applications in lighting, photography, videography, publishing, and other fields.
  58. Color Management- Color management is controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices.
  59. Rendering Intent- Rendering intent is how the color reproduction process should cope with colors and tones which are outside of, or near the edge of the device's color gamut, in order to achieve the desired color 'rendering'.
  60. Out of Gamut- Out of Gamut means that a color is beyond the scope of colors that a particular device can create.
  61. Half-tone- Half-tone is a system of reproducing the continuous tone of a photographic print by a pattern of dots printed by offset litho.
  62. Histogram- A histogram is a graph representation of a digital image indicating the pixels allocated to each level.
  63. Selection- Selection means to isolate one or more parts of a image.
  64. Feathering- Feathering is the action of softening the edge of a digital selection.
  65. Mask- Masks are are way to apply something to a very specific portion of a image.
  66. Quick Mask- Quick mask is a temporary alpha channel used for refining or making selections.
  67. Alpha Channel- Alpha channel is an additional channel used for storing masks and selections.
  68. Adjustment Layer- A adjustment layer is an image adjustment placed on a layer.
  69. Smart Object- A smart object is technology that was first introduced in Photoshop CS2 that maintains the original form of an embedded image but still allows it to be edited and enhanced. Smart objects are used in many non-destructive editing or enhancement techniques.
  70. Crop- Cropping reduces the image size to enhance composition or limit information.
  71. Resample- Resample is to alter the total number of pixels describing a digital image
  72. Transform- Transform is used to scale, rotate, skew, and just distort the perspective of any graphic you’re working with in general.
  73. Clone- Clone is a tool in Photoshop, its also known as a clone stamp tool. The clone tool selects and samples an area of your picture and then uses these pixels to paint over any marks.
  74. Warp- Warp is a tool in  Photoshop that allows you to drag control points to manipulate the shape of images
  75. Aspect Ratio- Aspect ratio is the ration of height to width. This usually refers to the light- sensitive area or format of a camera.
  76. Anti-aliasing- Anti-aliasing is the process of smoothing the appearance of a curved line in a digital image.
  77. Path- A path is the outline of a vector shape.
  78. Clipping Path- Clipping path is used to omit part of a path
  79. Font Face- Font face allows you to use real fonts in your web pages without resorting to workarounds that rely on image.
  80. Font Family- Font Families are collections of fonts that share an overall appearance, and are designed to be used together
  81. Depth of Field- Depth of Field is the zone of sharpness variable by aperture, focal length or subject distance.
  82. Aperture- A circular opening in the lens the a controls light reaching the film.
  83. Shutter Speed- Shutter speen is the length of time a camera's shutter is open.
  84. CMOS- CMOS  stands for Complementary Metal Semiconductor. This is a chip used widely within he computer industry, and is now often used as a image sensor in digital cameras.
  85. Mega Pixel- A mega pixel is equal to one million pixels. The higher the mega pixel the better the resolution.
  86. Image Resolution- Image resolution is the detail an image holds.
  87. Print Resolution- Print resolution is the average number of dots per square inch.
  88. Screen Resolution- Screen resolution is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed.
  89. Film Grain- Film grain is the tiny particles of silver medal or dye that make up the final image. Fast films have larger grain than slower films. Focus finders are used to magnify the projected image so that the grain can be seen and a accurate focus obtained.
  90. Noise- Noise is the electronic interference producing white speckles in the image.
  91. Film Speed / ISO- Film speed is a precise number or ISO rating given to a film or device indication its degree of light sensitivity. (ISO stands for International Standards Organization. ISO is a numerical system for rating the speed or relative sensitivity of a film or device.)
  92. Moire'- Moire' is a repetitive pattern usually caused by the interference of overlapping symmetrical dots or lines.
  93. Visual Hierarchy- Visual Hierarchy it the order that the human eye perceives what it sees.
  94. Texture- Texture is the feel, appearance, or consistency of a surface
  95. Sample- Sample is to select a color value for analysis.
  96. Unsharp Mask- Unsharp mask is used to sharpen a image by raising the contrast of a image.
  97. Gaussian Blur-n Gaussian blur is a filter used for defocusing a digital image.
  98. Vanishing Point- Vanishing point is a Photoshop feature designed to allow the manipulation of photos within a three-dimensional space.
  99. Point of View- Point of view is a photography composition tool that means from what angle or position you take the photograph.
  100. Magic Wand- The magic wand is a selection tool used in digital editing to assist in doing touch ups.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Rules of Composition

Assignment:  Understanding Rules of Composition

This post should be about composition and taking a good photograph.  What makes a good photograph also is what makes a great image so this knowledge is transferable in all design that you do. I would like this blog to talk about ten tips for composing a great shot. Please do more than just list the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Spiral, explain them a little and maybe find or take an image to show your understanding of the principle.


     Okay, now I am no photographer. I mean I can take a picture, and I do quite regularly. But as far as knowing what makes a good photo.... Umm.. I thought there where no rules in art. Photography is art so I thought that applied.  So for this assignment, off to Google I go. 
     So I googled rules of composition in  photography, only to discover that I was correct in thinking that there are no real rules only some established guidelines.  According to Photography Mad these guidelines will help you take more compelling photos.
     The first guideline is called the Rule of Thirds. In this rule you are advised to imagine that your image is divided into 9 equal parts by 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines. The rule says that your most important elements should be placed along these lines or at the points where the lines connect.  According to Photography Mad this will add balance and interest to your image.
     The second guideline is balancing elements. this is where you place your main subject off center, which creates an more interest but it can make your photo feel empty by leaving a void in the scene. Photography Mad suggests that you balance the weight of your main subject by including another object of lesser importance to fill the voided space.
     The third guideline is known as leading lines. This guideline plays on the fact that your eye is naturally drawn along lines.  I you think about how you place these lines in you composition, you will affect the way a person views the photo by pulling them into the photo, towards your subject. You can use any of the many types of lines int his guideline. Straight, diagonal, curvy, zig-zag, etc..
     The fourth guideline is symmetry and patterns. You are surrounded by symmetry and patterns, both natural and man-made. These can be very eye-catching, especially when they are not expected.
     The fifth guideline is called viewpoint. This is where the photographer plays with where they are shooting the subject from. Viewpoint can massively impact the message that is conveyed.  Instead of shooting from eye level, experiment with viewpoint by photographing from another angle, such as high above, down at ground level, from the back, etc...
     Our sixth guideline is background.  Background can make or break a photo in my opinion, to often you will see a photo where the subject blends into the background. Our eyes can distinguish the subject from the background in person very easily, but in a photo the subject is flattened into the background. Which can make them blend into it.
     The seventh guideline is depth. Now since your photo is 2-D, creating depth is important. You can create depth by including object in the foreground, middle ground, and background. Another than that can assist in creating depth is to intentionally overlap objects. Overlapping is where you partially cover one object with another. Our eyes can recognize these layers and separate them, which will cause more depth.
     The eight guideline is framing. There are so many things around us that can be used to create a natural frame, like trees and archways.
     The ninth guideline is cropping. Cropping can impact a photo by cutting out the background to ensure the subject gets the viewers full attention.
     The last guideline is experimentation. With digital photography, you no longer have to worry about the cost of film processing. There for you have more flexibility to try out new things. Experimenting with your photo taking can create fabulous photos, and you can have fun while doing it.