- What did you learn?
When working on this project, I learned some basic skills regarding Adobe Photoshop, including image modification and optimization, plus I also had a brief look at Adobe’s open-source web companion “Brackets”. In Photoshop, I was able to tinker with brightness, saturation, color correction, and layer masks. Within Brackets, I fulfilled a few lines of code that would display my web-optimized images and thumbnails in a webpage format.
2. What was easy?
Having the ability to retouch my images was really fun and opened the door for creativity. Things like adjusting the vibrance or lighting of the image wasn’t that bad. Even cloning certain parts of the image to hide “imperfections” was pretty straightforward, since I have had experience with this in the past.
3. What was challenging?
The trickiest thing about this project was the image optimization. Unfortunately, due to my images being quite large, I had to sacrifice quality for size, which made some of my images look a bit “pixelated”. However, it isn’t that easy to notice and I think for the original files being larger than I had expected, they turned out pretty well. Also, I had some problems getting my web images to display on the website, but I quickly realized that my web images had the incorrect file name. Once I managed to rename them properly, everything worked, meaning clicking on each thumbnail would redirect to the corresponding image.
4. How could your submission be improved?
I feel that the lack in image quality, some being more noticeable than others, is something to take into consideration for the future. I tried using a separate image-compression program, but nothing seemed to work that well. Had I been able to decrease the file size of the raw, un-edited image, the web and thumbnail portions would’ve turned out way better.
5. How could I improve the assignment for the next class?
I feel like we learned a lot of skills while working through this assignment, however, I think it would be fun to explore Brackets a bit more and possibly change how the thumbnails were arranged. I’m not a huge fan of how one thumbnail is dead-center on the bottom row. Instead, the image should be shifted one to the left. This would make for a more uniform thumbnail display.
6. How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?
In future assignments or projects, I will make sure that I have more of an idea/grasp on image compression and how to properly optimize images to retain quality while maintaining a small file size.
7. How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?
The inspiration for this project relates back to my trips to two National Parks, Yellowstone and Yosemite. Although we’re supposed to take images with a high-end camera and in real-time, due to COVID-19, I thought that it was a neat and safe idea to gather some images that I had saved from my phone (iPhone XR). These images aren’t that old (2 years at most) and capture some nice landscapes of these two iconic, scenic locations. All of the primitive images looked normal to begin with, but as I enhanced them accordingly in Photoshop, each one resulted in a “cleaner” image. Think of it as applying a second, fresh coat of paint over the first, dried coat. The “second coat” fills the gaps and “holes” that existed in the previous one. Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome, as I feel that my altered images as a whole are dynamic and unique.