Digital Creativity: Lesson 7 Photo Story

Today we had to create a story using props and then take digital images to show the story. By then using our Photoshop skills we edited the images and hopefully you can understand our ‘teddy snatching’ featured below!

The End!

Digital Creativity: Lesson 7

Today we worked with actual photographs, retouching them by using the adjustment panel for contrast, levels and colour balance. I learned how to remove the damned ‘red eye’ and also how to repair fold lines in old photos. The clone stamp allows you to copy an area within the photo and position it also within the photo. This is a brilliant tool! Lastly I learned how to repair areas that has scratches and dust marks using the patch tool. I have uploaded the photos we worked on….before and after…..telling you which tool I used…..so have a look………!!

           

Above: Repaired fold lines and scratches using the Cone Stamp tool & Spot Healing tool

Above: Extra people and motorbikes added using the Clone Stamp tool

Digital Creativity: Lesson 6 Me, Myself & I

So last week we started to digitize our chosen ‘love’. As it took me a little longer to complete I have finished it off in todays class and I have uploaded it below. Compare it to the sketch I uploaded last week and hopefully you will be as impressed with the outcome as I am!!

Digital Creativity: Lesson 6

Today we worked with the pen tool again and a new tool called paths. This tool allows you to create various effects along the lines you’ve drawn in one simple click. See below examples of this…..

                      

After finishing the images above we moved on to work with a scanned hand-drawn image to develop it into a digital image using the tools we learned over the last few weeks. By creating various layers and using the tools including the brush tool, paths, filters, burn & dodge tools to darken & lighten, opacity, gradients and free transform…..I successfully completed the assignment. I have uploaded the before and after image for your appreciation!

BEFORE…………

              and ever AFTER………!

Digital Creativity: Lesson 5

So today we covered colours, shape tool, pen tool and brush tool. The pen tool is difficult to get the hang of. I will have to work on that alot more. Both the shape tool and the brush tool are a pleasure to use. The end results they can help you create are endless!! We will be using these tools next week to digitally create the Me, Myself and I assignment and I am soooo looking forward to that! Below is a sample of what we played around with today.

Digital Creativity: Lesson 4 Me Myself and I

In this lesson we were asked to create four thumbnail concepts depicting a personal love and hate, e.g. My name is Roisin and I love chocolate, My name is Roisin and I hate squid. From these concept sketches we had to choose our favourite ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and develop the concept more to create a final full scale image for each. See below….I am actually very proud of these!!

 

 

 

             

I loved this exercise! It gave me the opportunity to visually incorporate text, i.e. my name with imagery to portray a visual concept thatI then asked my friends to guess the meaning of. All guesses were correct so I’m happy enough.

Digital Creativity: Lesson 4 Web Critique

My chosen website to analyse is www.energysavingbulbs.ie  Theres almost a balance between good and bad examples of design principles on this site. Firstly regarding ‘simplicity‘, in my opinion this site is a bad example of this principle because the user is bombarded with too much information and this makes it hard to find what they are looking for. Also there seems to be alot of non-data ink which could frustrate the user into switching to another site. On a good note the ‘typography‘ is consistent in the use of one sans-serf font face generally, however the side menu titles are at the same size as the list they are supposed to be attracting the user to. In my opinion this is not effective because the users eye is not drawn to anywhere in particular. The use of ‘whitespace‘  is a good example of how it should be used because the macro space has not been comprimised with text. The ‘layout’ is also effective with the information being displayed in three columns and the consistency is carried through on each page of the site. Illustrating a good example of the use of  ‘conventions’,  this site has a ‘search’ tool and ‘log in’ tool. 

 With a few small changes to the site I believe it could be alot more effective and inviting for users and therefore possibly generating more online sales.

Digital Creativity: Lesson 4

Today we worked more on Photoshop skills and added some scary features to Gerry Ryan, using adjustment layers, the pen tool and the clone stamp pool. I had good craic with these. Poor ‘aul Gerry!!

And on our own we were asked to create another positive or negative image…..I used Britney and doesn’t she look good!! I used the adjustment layer for hue/saturation which made the sky more of a baby blue colour.

Digital Creativity: Lesson 3

This week we really got to grips with the tools in photoshop; editing, copying, duplicating, stretching, adding a ‘glow’, saving images for web. Our task was to take an image of Louis Walsh and make the image appear as positive as possible!

 

On the contrary to that we had to take another image of a celebrity and make it appear as negative as possible. I really enjoyed this task and I’m feeling alot more comfortable on Photoshop because of it. So which is your favourite? Mine is Madonna. There must be an evil streak in me somewhere!!  

Our homework then was the ‘Life & Death’ truck symbols. We had to create three using any ideas we could think of. I scribbled down a few ideas and then selected my favourite that I thought worked well to develop it more. I like these types of tasks because they keep me thinking in a creative way and visualising solutions in my head. See below……

 

Digital Creativity: Lesson 2

So today we started on Photoshop. We covered some basic tools in class yesterday and today we got the chance to put these into practice. Our task was to edit each piece of fruit/vegetable and separate them onto individual layers. Once we finished this we could turn off the background layer and move all the pieces around to create the end result….a face!! It was a really good task for understanding the editing tools and its brilliant to have a finished image that is recognizable to others!

Then our assignment this week was to graphically communicate a word by means of a road sign and then create two road signs of our own. This involved alot of thought but it was fun coming up with our own road signs at the end! See below……