Of broken promises.
Typically, when I start a blog, I update like mad for the first day or two, and then something weird happens. Generally, I just get bored, and stop posting.
This blog is part of my university coursework. So, I promised myself I wouldn't let it go that way. So, why then, did I?
Regardless, I still have a chance to put things right. SO, that is what I shall do in this post. Starting with the details of my 2nd photoshop tutorial. In this, we were given several images to play around with. Some of them were old and therefore slightly oddly coloured, and some were damaged. Every photo needed alteration of some sort. Whilst some were handled by photoshop's 'auto contrast' feature, others needed a little more work. Perhaps the most spectacular examples are the ones I shall outline now.
We were given photographs that literally needed repairing. One of them, of a mother and her two daughters, had been chopped up. The original is presented below :
This was fairly straightforward. First of all, I used the polygonal tool to select each of the three regions that had been torn off the base. By cutting them and pasting them into a new layer, it meant that I could relay the pieces as closely together along the tears as possible. Sadly, this left a lot of the tear visible. In order to disguise this, my major technique was to use the clone stamp tool. Alt+click onto an area of the picture selects that area of the picture as your brush, so to speak, and then you can paint onto the picture with this new pattern. Obviously, one has to be careful not to paint with too big a brush, lest one paints the damaged areas back on accidentally. My edited version is below :
The next task seemed a lot trickier. Here, we were being asked to colourise a black and white image. Namely, this image :
Again, the polygonal select tool was my saviour. This tool allows you keep on selecting new points, and eventually you join the points together to make a selected region. Now, as long as you have 'add selection' checked on the toolbar, a new click will select a new region, but not lose the first region. So, I selected evry single one of the stripes. With them all selected, I opened a new layer, and bucket filled it in red. Naturally, this led to all the stripes being a unifrom red. So, by lowering the opacity and fill level for the new layer, I allowed the original background layer to show through. I then did the same for the blue in the corner, and to show the difference it makes, also selected every star. The corner layer was blue, and the stars were white, each layer filled to roughly 50%, and roughly 50% opaque. The decision to use these percentages was more based on art than science, because they just looked right. Finished image is once again presented below :
(There were other pictures to alter, but these 2 are the most striking, in my opinion.)
The following lecture told us about vector animation, and showed us some examples of flash from both the web and TV. We will be going into flash in some detail next year, apparently. Now, I am no expert, but I am already comfortable with flash. I have created several short movies over the years, as intros for websites. In fact, my most recent, and therefore best, can be seen by clicking this link here!
The course remains as interesting as ever. Especially since we have now had to sign up to BigStockPhoto in order to attempt to sell some of our images. Making profit? That is MY kind of assignement! Signing up requires you to read the tutorials, and then pass a test. Amusingly, it is impossible to fail the test, as I am told an incorrect answer gives you a pop-up box telling you your answer is incorrect. I guess they don't want to limit their potential for subscribers too much!
This blog is part of my university coursework. So, I promised myself I wouldn't let it go that way. So, why then, did I?
Regardless, I still have a chance to put things right. SO, that is what I shall do in this post. Starting with the details of my 2nd photoshop tutorial. In this, we were given several images to play around with. Some of them were old and therefore slightly oddly coloured, and some were damaged. Every photo needed alteration of some sort. Whilst some were handled by photoshop's 'auto contrast' feature, others needed a little more work. Perhaps the most spectacular examples are the ones I shall outline now.
We were given photographs that literally needed repairing. One of them, of a mother and her two daughters, had been chopped up. The original is presented below :
This was fairly straightforward. First of all, I used the polygonal tool to select each of the three regions that had been torn off the base. By cutting them and pasting them into a new layer, it meant that I could relay the pieces as closely together along the tears as possible. Sadly, this left a lot of the tear visible. In order to disguise this, my major technique was to use the clone stamp tool. Alt+click onto an area of the picture selects that area of the picture as your brush, so to speak, and then you can paint onto the picture with this new pattern. Obviously, one has to be careful not to paint with too big a brush, lest one paints the damaged areas back on accidentally. My edited version is below :
The next task seemed a lot trickier. Here, we were being asked to colourise a black and white image. Namely, this image :
Again, the polygonal select tool was my saviour. This tool allows you keep on selecting new points, and eventually you join the points together to make a selected region. Now, as long as you have 'add selection' checked on the toolbar, a new click will select a new region, but not lose the first region. So, I selected evry single one of the stripes. With them all selected, I opened a new layer, and bucket filled it in red. Naturally, this led to all the stripes being a unifrom red. So, by lowering the opacity and fill level for the new layer, I allowed the original background layer to show through. I then did the same for the blue in the corner, and to show the difference it makes, also selected every star. The corner layer was blue, and the stars were white, each layer filled to roughly 50%, and roughly 50% opaque. The decision to use these percentages was more based on art than science, because they just looked right. Finished image is once again presented below :
(There were other pictures to alter, but these 2 are the most striking, in my opinion.)
The following lecture told us about vector animation, and showed us some examples of flash from both the web and TV. We will be going into flash in some detail next year, apparently. Now, I am no expert, but I am already comfortable with flash. I have created several short movies over the years, as intros for websites. In fact, my most recent, and therefore best, can be seen by clicking this link here!
The course remains as interesting as ever. Especially since we have now had to sign up to BigStockPhoto in order to attempt to sell some of our images. Making profit? That is MY kind of assignement! Signing up requires you to read the tutorials, and then pass a test. Amusingly, it is impossible to fail the test, as I am told an incorrect answer gives you a pop-up box telling you your answer is incorrect. I guess they don't want to limit their potential for subscribers too much!
posted by CheekyLee at 7:01 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home