My Visual Diary: Week 3, Day 1

This afternoon we had a lesson on Adobe Photoshop as our tutors weren't sure whether all of us had been taught the basics of Photoshop. I had been taught the basics at school but some of the things in the session I had never even heard of so the session today was very beneficial to me.

We first started on the very basic things like how to open up a picture onto the program so that we would have a picture to work on and edit. To do this you have to go to file - open - choose image. We then went oon to talk about what certain words meant for example the word resolution . Resolution means different colours of tiny pixels that make up an image, and then we went on to talk about what different file types there are and we came up with a JPEG, RAW, PNG and PSD. To zoom in you can either press the 'Ctrl' button if on a PC but if on a Mac the 'Cmd' and the '+' button, or click on the magnifying glass which is located on the toolbar down the left hand side of the program. Similarly to zoom out you can either press the 'Ctrl' button if on a PC but if your on a Mac the 'Cmd' and the '-' button or the magnifying glass. To undo something that hasn't gone right you can press down the 'Ctrl' or 'Cmd' button and press 'Z'. After we had done that we moved on to screen resolution which is something I didn't know existed but now I know it's something we would need to know if we wanted to do a big print. If the image was just going on a screen then the ppi should be on about 72ppi but if it was to be printed it would need to be on about 300ppi. To change the ppi go along to Image - image size, ppi stands for pixels per image.

We then talked through the mode we should be working on which was RGB colour. To check that you are on this mode youcan go to Image - mode - RGB color but for commercial printers which we won't be using at the moment you would use the mode CNYK. To change things like the image brightness, contrast, levels, curves and black and white etc you can go to Image - adjustments where there will be a whole list of adjustments to choose from. To add palettes on the right hand side of the program go to window and choose from the selection but we got told that history is a good one to have as you can see what you have done and if you don't like what happens you can click on the mistake and it will get rid of it. To create more than one layer you go to Layer - duplicate layer this means that you can work -on the same image but add different effects to each layers so that when you come to flatten the image all of the effects show up on the picture together. For example, if you made two layers and on one layer was the original image and the other layer was a black and white image of the original then you could bring some colour back into the black and white image. To do this you need to make sure that you have two layers and one to be in colour and one to be in black and white then you use the eraser tool over the black and white image to bring colour back through. When you create more than one layer, before saving you need to flatten them so to do that you go to Layer - flatten image. Once you have finished editing your image how you want to you need to make sure that you save it as a PSD file if you have layers.

This is one of my images that I tried out with the technique of bringing some colour back into a black and white image. I am very pleased with how it turned out because it is really effective having the veins of the Ivy leave showing through on the rather dull black and white background. However, it took me a while to finally get a final edit that I was happy with as the layers weren't working for me so I had to start from scratch a couple of times but eventually I came out with this image that I am very happy with.

I came across some difficulties while I was trying to create this edit. One difficulty I had was understanding what layer you had to use the eraser on in order to get the colour to come through. Because I had this problem I tried again with another image.

I tried to edit this image in Photoshop in order for me to learn from the mistake that I made the first time in getting confused with which of the layers to erase on. I now know that I need to turn the new layer (a copy of the original image) black and white and I can then use the eraser tool on top of the black and white. I decided to use my image of a cat because I thought that the facial features would look effective if the colour was brought back into them on a black and white image. However, I don't like this edit as I don't like the colour of the nose on the cat. I personally think that the colour of the nose stands out too much as I only wanted subtle colours to come through as the original image of the cat wasn't very bright in the first place.

Because I didn't like how the nose had turned out in the other edit I tried again so that I could try and get an edit I was happy with. With this edit I feel that it is a very subtle edit like I wanted but I feel like it is maybe a bit too subtle so I think to improve this edit even more I could erase the bricks on the floor to make the black and white cat stand out.

I tried erasing the bricks on a section of the image and I think it looks good because the floor is roughly the same colour as the cats eyes so blends in well. I decided to finish off the whole of the brick floor as I wanted to see what the final edit would look like.

This is the final image which I like because the edit is very subtle as the cats eyes are showing their colour but only slightly and then the floor has a little bit of green in but is mostly grey and a skin tone colour which is the colour of the cat's eyes. I'm glad that I did different experiments with the same image in order to come up with one final image that I am happy with.