Hello all, this is my first project for DMA 201. This project made me flash back to when I was in 11th grade. That being because I haven’t used Photoshop since then. Surprisingly, that was 10 years ago and a lot in Photoshop has changed since then. There are a few things that have remained the same. Some terms definitely stuck with me, such as the “marching ants” and the magnetic lasso tool. However, Photoshop has definitely evolved and become much more complicated. So being fully truthful I had some difficulty with this project and adjusting to the changes that have been made. Another thing that has made this challenging is using a Mac. Ive never had a Mac computer and always used windows software so this added a bit of challenge to this as well. I am happy that we are using Mac’s because I did end up being a Mac desktop a week before we started this class, so I will definitely will take a great deal out of this class.
First off, I wanted my Halloween card to be spooky. So what’s more scary than something appearing out of nowhere? I started looking for a simple image to use that could play as a good background and easily piece a second image in. (basically the thing that appears out of nowhere.) I found this image on google using the tools. It fitting the right parameters of being a large size image and being labeled for reuse. So I found my background image, I thought that the tricky part would be to find someone or something scary to put sitting on the bench but I actually got pretty lucky and found an image that went well with the background and sat well on the bench.
This image of the girl I found had felt like a good find. She pairs well with the bench and the image size was around the same size as the bench I just had to size her image down a touch. I used quite a bit of the touch up brush to bring a lot of the image back because some of it the tool didn’t pick up. (like the portions between her heels and arms.) Other than that this was pretty simple.
The text portion of this project was interesting. I had no clue that you could download different fonts off the internet and after learning this I have started noticing a lot of differences in text between advertisements and other businesses use. This portion of the project was simple as well. The professor mentioned that I should put an outer glow on my text to make it pop and I think it does a good job of doing so. It also adds a little more color to a rather black and white Halloween card.
For the back of the card I did a simple image from google but I did edit the image a bit. The white background that the pumpkin came on wasn’t a complete match to the white background that I had on the card. Particularly around the shaded parts of the pumpkin. I actually reduced a good amount of the shading underneath the pumpkin. The image originally looked as if light was coming in from the right side of the pumpkin creating more shadow on the left side. I took away most of it and now the shading is more towards the bottom. I feel as if this gives it a more pleasing look. I used a different font for the back of the card but copied the look of the outer glow because I liked this look.
The portion of text that is wrapped around the image is poorly done I believe. It was difficult and it took me about 20 mins to just get a basic line around the image to wrap the text and it still ended up crossing over parts of the girl. (pictured above.) As well as portions of the bench. These are factors I’m going to have to touch up.
Finally, I was ready to change my Photoshop card into a PDF so I could print the card. One issue I ran into was when I changed the file format the text that said “Happy Halloween” at the bottom of the car had malfunctioned. I don’t know why this occurred but it was something I had to go back and change. Then recreate another PDF file.
In the end I feel like my project turned out well with how long it’s been since I’ve lasted touched Photoshop. There were a few other things I had trouble with. The first being the layer masks. I was struggling to grasp the fact that this wasn’t just Microsoft paint and I couldn’t just crop out an image. after awhile I think I got the hang of it but I definitely need more practice. The next was printing. The first time I printed out my card it both sides were opposite facing each other. This was frustrating and I wonder if that was because of an error I did on the printer or an issue with how I printed the file from the computer. All in all I feel like there is still some work to be done on making this a better project but believe this was a good start to honing my Photoshop skills.