Project 1

I enjoyed working on our first project- creating both a web and print portfolio of 16 images around a certain topic. The theme I chose was summer, my favorite season. I did use a lot of photos I have previously taken, but I also incorporated several photos I took from magazines which pertained nicely to this theme.

This project taught me many new skills, like many different ways to edit, enhance, and adjust images in Photoshop. The main tools I used to perfect my images were the spot healing brush tool and the clone stamp tool. I also learned about levels and curves, which can be used to adjust the exposure and lighting of different areas of the images. Lastly, I learned how to properly remove the background of an image and replace it with a new one, which I did using the quick selection tool.

I found that overall the editing and enhancing of the images went the smoothest for me. I enjoyed experimenting with brightness, hues, vibrancy, saturation, and shadows and highlights to get the look I wanted. The use of Figma for the print portion went well, as I have some experience with it. Something I struggled with was the resolution and clarity of my images. Some of my images looked very clear and of high resolution in Photoshop, but when they made it to the web they appeared a bit grainy. Although I used the unsharpen mask and made other adjustments, it seemed some images could have been clearer. I could improve my project by getting all my images more to the same size, and also working on other ways to increase the resolution and optimize them.

I would not recommend to the professor to change anything about this project, I found the exercise and skills covered very useful. I was provided with all the resources and materials needed to succeed. If I had any questions, I knew I was able to reach out through email or office hours to solve any uncertainty.

The process of editing and optimizing photos is something that anybody can use, and is something useful to know in a society where technology is becoming more and more prevalent. Using Photoshop and becoming familiar with the tools is something that I can use in future projects in this class, in a work setting, or just for personal projects. For instance, if my job involved advertising and marketing, these skills would be crucial in order to produce the clearest, eye catching designs. I also think a common application of these skills would be removing objects from a background or from the photo in general.

A reading that helped me during this project was the one provided to us for class, “A Beginners Guide to Bitmaps”. Previously, I never knew what bitmaps were or how they related to images. This reading was very technical and informed me of the different aspects of them and how they affect the images. The reading also covered resolution, and how the resolution affects the quality of an image since it determines the size of the pixel and can modify the size.

Here are three photo transformations I liked the best from my project: