This day consisted of learning skills within the Adobe suite, namely Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. An ability to use these three key program's is essential within the creative industry as they are great tools for visualising ideas and bringing them to life. I already have a substantial knowledge of how to use Photoshop, but Illustrator and InDesign are two completely new program for me.
We began with using Adobe Illustrator, with which I created the logos below. The final images of these logos wasn't intentional and the focus wasn't on the aesthetics of the graphic but instead using all the different tools that Illustrator has to offer. This program is the best out of the three for creating shapes and graphics from scratch whereas Photoshop is one for manipulating existing photos. In the image below I began by using a standard type tool to write my name in a light pink but simple font. The manipulation tool in the toolbar down the side of the screes was amazing for changing text and images with a verity of different results that included twirling, dragging, expanding and wiggling around the graphics. After drawing a rectangle behind that and adding a light turquoise gradient, I used the 3D tool to pull out a shadow from the rectangle. We were warned that using this effect was likely to slow down the program by a large margin so I didn't over use this and just used it to add depth to the image. I personally feel that this is has the possibility to look slightly tacky if used in the wrong context or as part of a different aesthetic, particularly as I was unable to change the colour of the shadow which adds a 90's feel to the graphic.
The image below was also created on Illustrator and showed me using the shape tools to cut away and create shapes in various different colours. I typed using the tool that enabled me to write along a line which explains the curved nature of the 'omg'. We were then taught how to change the properties of a layer such as making it saturated, light, dark, soft, vivid etc. which made that particular shape change colour or texture. To two of the stars I added a pixelated effect which gave them a multicoloured appearance to my desired intensity which I then modified further by changing their properties to suit.
This was an edit that I created using photoshop from scratch that is built up of several different individual images. I had no initial plan for how this experiment was going to turn out but after spontaneously choosing different elements to incorporate, this is what I came up with.
I began by removing the negative space surrounding the picture of the dolphin which I then did the same with to the penguins. For both of them I used the eraser tool to make the layer transparent, getting onto the corners and detail by changing the size of the tool. To get sharp edges I made the outside of the tool as hard as possible but then softened them using the blur tool once they were incorporated into the image to make them look less like they were just stuck on. I would then go on to smart sharpen the entirety of the image once it was complete to give a effective sharpening of equal intensity across the piece.
I took the images of clouds from Google and made sure to find images with a large file size because scaling images up in Photoshop is always risky as it results in a loss of quality. I added a pale blue background and fiddled with the opacity and properties of the cloud layers before erasing certain areas to give the final effect which actually consists of three original cloud images. The birds were another feature that I took from Google. I made sure to choose an image with a white background that could easily be removed and find that these were populous when I typed 'birds Photoshop texture' into the search bar that revealed a series of pre-prepared images just for the purpose of layering up on Photoshop.
After the plane had been pasted in, I quickly added a starry overlay before merging all the layers together. This allowed me to sharpen the image as a whole. A trick I have discovered for sharpening images is to duplicate the layer before making the lower one blurred with a Gaussian blur and the top one sharp with the smart sharpen tool. The sharp layer on top is then made slightly less opaque to around 58% which gives a balance between soft and sharp areas without being too overpowering.
The page above is a screenshot of my InDesign document which features a lovely passage describing Mary Berry's early life. I found this program relatively easy to use considering that I've never used it before. The area that we explored such as creating text, changing its properties and moving it around resembled publisher and I managed to create columns to my page to give it a newspaper layout. I then rearranged the text to make it shift around the logo I had created in Illustrator when I copied and pasted that on.
Final image of combined elements:
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