Saturday, 31 March 2012

Playing on Photoshop

Pictured left is the spray paint effect we learn in class. This was quite a challenge for me to make it look authentic, but I know I will improve - I am still getting my bearings with photoshop.


Below is the watercolour image I created following a tutorial; Create Cool Watercolor Effects on Photoshop




The aspects I found challenging were first of all, making my use of strokes resemble hair authentically, in a way that really did look like hair. Sometimes I made it too thick, or the strokes just looked unnatural to me. 


Perhaps the biggest issue I had was with masking; following the steps exactly as they told me, I just could not figure it out... Whenever I selected the brush after adding the mask, and using black, it would just colour in behind the picture, or wipe out the whole background with it. In the end I solved this by just using the pentagonal wand tool - I simply cropped off the rest of her body rather than masking it. 


Finally, I could not figure out how to make my own gradient for the text. The tutorial said to create a blue, red, green and yellow gradient, but I could not find where to do this. Instead I just used a preset red, blue and yellow gradient - unfortunately green is missing. 

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Scanning

How to Scan (HP Scanner)

NB: When scanning an object or photo it is best to leave a 2cm wide gap around the edge, to ensure the whole item will be captured

  • Place item on the glass
  • Select colour/grayscale as you wish
  • Press scan
  • Crop image if applicable
  • Click 'adjust' and alter the pixels/inch where necessary - In this instance, I altered my images to 300 DPI
  • Save the image 
In order to sustain a good quality image in presentations, web or printing, it is necessary to know the ideal resolution for the picture to be. 

For projecting in class: 102 DPI
The web: 72 DPI
Printing in a book/magazine: 300 DPI
Printed on a laserwriter: 200 DPI

(Information from http://www.learn.columbia.edu/mcah2/pdf/training_resolution.pdf)

For instance, here is the same photo of a wallet saved at different resolutions...

100 DPI
300 DPI

Both images at 100 DPI and 300 DPI are better suited to the web than an image of, say, 600 DPI (which was too big to upload).

Here are some more scanned objects and patterns:






It's interesting to note how the scanner does not pick up shiny/metallic surfaces... the apple logo on the back of this phone is invisible!