Photoshop Reflection

Overview of Project: 

Starting a new year of graphic design meant starting a new year of tutorials. Our job was to accomplish the many tutorials given to us in order to learn a variety of new skills we will be presenting in photoshop. 

What I learned: 

Over the course of the tutorials I learned many new skills. I learned how to remove branding, move labels, get ride of images, take away items from photos, as well as clean up portraits so they are free of blemishes. I learned to use tools like the spot healing brush, content aware fill, clone stamp, and patch tool. All of these skills helped me to create great images every time. 

Spot Healing Tool 

Strengths:

My strengths when it came to this project were using my knowledge on the different skills. Following the different videos made it relatively easy for me to understand how to use each of the tools and how they would change the picture.  

Weaknesses:

My weakness came at times when my computer would not work, or when the files would already be messed with. Many times I found that the images provided had already been messed with in way that additional  layers had been added and locked, or  I was unable to get the tool to work properly inside of the file opened. The skills itself I did not seem to struggle with, it was merely the computer delays that stopped me the most. 

What could be different/the same in the future:

Patch Tool 

When working in Photoshop next time, the only things I would consider changing is how the videos were made. Aspects of the video were not always the same on tier Photoshop, verses my own Photoshop. As I am not someone who remembers all the shortcuts keys, I found it very frustrating at times to find all the tools needed when it comes to using different tools for things like the challenge problem at the end of this post.
Some things I would suggest stay the same, are all the skills taught through tutorials. Those tools seemed to be the most common, as well as the only ones we will need to use for our projects this year. As this is not a very advanced class, the skills that we used seem to bump us up a bit further than previous years of Photoshop.

Final thoughts/conclusion:

Final Tutorial 

Overall, my favorite part of the project by far was the last photo shown on this post. I was given a set number of photos, and I had no parameters other than to turn it in. It game me my own creative freedom in which I could change the photo however I wanted. I mainly stuck to keeping the photo as natural as possible but by adding in all the landscape, I created a basic piece of abstract. The design of how it is done, draws the views eyes in, which I love about that. I plan on making more things like that in Photoshop as it was the most enjoyable thing I have done in graphic design the past two years. After doing Photoshop tutorials for the last month though, I am officially ready to move on to illustrator!  

                                 

Challenge Photo

ONW Planner Procedures!

ONW Procedures Assignment:

As our first project of the year kicks off, we started with a simple assignment. Our assignment was to create a procedure video showing school expectations as if we were going to give it to them entire school. The video had to be no more than 30 seconds, could not have a voice over, as well as include the 6-shot system. 

Pre-Production

Pre-Production began with the story board. We panned out how our video was going to go, drew pictures, and discussed the ideas with our teammates on how we could get the most information in, in a fun and quick way. After learning camera set-up, my partner and I decided how we were going to incorporate all the rules, as well as the information.

Production 

Production was the most fun part. We used the third hour office aid as our main actress. After finding an empty classroom we began filming our video. We initially started with a wide shot to set the scene. From there we went right into a close-up which was intended to be an extreme close up. As she takes the drink of the water, you can see of the camera focused on the background and not the subject of the video.

Medium 

Close-Up 

Extreme Wide 

     


As the video proceeds on you see the camera panning following the subject around the busy scene. The video does not feature an extreme close-up as it should, and the ending shot does not look the best as we began to pan the camera again. 

Post-Production

After shooting all the clips, we loaded them into Adobe Premiere. At that point we began to edit the video. As this was our first time using Premiere, editing seemed to take much longer than it needed to. Placing all the clips where they needed to go, cropping them to meet video rules, rearranging to tell a story, then adding music before final publication. 

Evaluation 

During evaluation, classmates had given feedback such as how adding music would be beneficial and be more appealing to an audience. The original video did not have music and was perceived as a "silent film". Another comment added was that when doing videos, still shots is all we need - we had a tendency to pan on a couple shots. Finally, we were told that the last part of the video would be better if we had positioned the camera in a different location; the shot looked too busy and made it hard to focus on just the one subject.