Archive for July, 2008
Photo Editing Techniques: Cropping
Justin Lemaire
If you are editing a photo in Photoshop, there are a number of different things you can do to it in order to make it better. One such technique is known as cropping, which you can use to make your picture smaller.
Cropping a picture will allow you to remove parts of the picture that are not relevant to what it is you want the picture to show. You can remove elements of the background that detract from the main object in the picture as well as space that is doing nothing but adding to the size of the image. Cropping not only makes a better image in terms of visual efficiency, but it also makes a smaller file size that is easier to manage in an overall sense.
When proceeding with a crop operation, it is best to mentally divide your picture into thirds horizontally and vertically, creating nine different sections in your picture and four point of intersection within the lines. A good visual trick is to place important parts of your pictures at one of these four points, as that will allow it to stand out relative to the rest of the image.
Cropping and Resizing - The funniest movie is here. Find it
Photoshop Effects: Censorship
Justin Lemaire
From time to time, it might be necessary for you to censor an image in order to blur part of a person, place or thing. This can be necessary for copyright purposes, for safety and security reasons or simply in order to create a desired effect on a person that is seeing the image. If you need to do this, here’s how you do it.
First, make sure you have the picture loaded into Photoshop. Then, zoom into the area that you wish to censor, making sure that you have enough wiggle room around the edges so that you can capture the entire area and see it within your monitor. Zooming in that close is usually not required, but if you want the details to be perfect it is usually a good idea to work on that scale.
Once you have the area you wish to work with, choose one of the marquee tools and then select the area you want to censor, making sure that you have the complete area within the boundaries of the marquee. You can always just try again if you miss, so don’t feel too pressured about getting it exactly right the first time.
Once things have been selected, you then need to go to “filter”, then “pixelate” and finally “mosaic”. The larger the cell size that you set, the higher the censorship of the selected area will be. You can experiment with different cell sizes to see what the final censorship effects are.
Photoshop Effects: Eye Colour
Justin Lemaire
While there are many nifty things that you can use Adobe Photoshop to do, there are few that are as elegant an example of the power of the program as the eye colour effects. Believe it or not, you can actually use Photoshop to change the colour of an eye in a specific picture. This can be very helpful when you are using a base picture in order to create something completely different or with a surreal take.
To get started, you will need to load an image into Photoshop and then zoom in so that you have a close up view of the eye at a size that allows you to work with it. Then, clicking on the lasso tool, you need to draw a circle around the eye that has the entire eye within it. This is difficult to do at first, but with enough tries you will eventually get the hang of it.
Once selected, you then need to access the layer menu, selecting “new adjustment layer” from the available options. Then, select “hue/saturation” from the new list of available options, clicking ok once you have both things selected. A new window will come up that allows you to change the colour of everything within the lassoed area, which you can use to change the colour of the eye to any colour you please.
Change Your Eye Color With Photoshop - The funniest home videos are here
Introduction to Adobe Photoshop
Justin Lemaire
With many different concepts regarding colour theory and general design principles already behind us, it is time to really get down to the nitty gritty of modern online graphic design. And there is no better piece of software to start with than Adobe Photoshop.
Granted, Photoshop is an expensive piece of software. But it is also the industry standard as far as design goes and if you can find a way to get a copy off a friend or through some other means for a reduced price, you can learn from the following posts about the basics of Photoshop and how to use it to make your designs better. While Photoshop will not single-handedly make you into a great designer, using it can allow you the chance to express yourself through art in ways that you may not have previously thought possible. People that can’t draw with a pencil can often become fantastic graphic designers in Photoshop and that is perhaps one reason why the software is so popular.
The next few series of posts will be devoted to Photoshop and will help you get a feel for how to use the software. A lot of people tend to learn Photoshop by just fooling around with the different options and playing with buttons to learn what they do and while this is a good way to learn anything, the basics that I teach you here should make that process a lot more efficient.
How To Use Layers in Adobe Photoshop
Byalung
Using Adobe Photoshop can be hard if you don’t get the right tutorials. In fact, graphics designing does seem challenging and rewarding and it all depends on understanding the basics and features that come with the software to fabricate and create great image enhancing effects.
Among them include layering. Here is a good video that will guide you in using layering in Adobe Photoshop.
The Importance of Colour Theory
Justin Lemaire
I’ve probably talked as much about the history of colour theory as I’m going to during this section of posts. From here on in we will be discussing the details of colour theory at length. However, I’d just like to take the moment to discuss its importance. I’m a science student at heart, so this influences the way I try to bring subjects to the attention of others.
From the point of view of history, the history of colour theory is important because of the fact that all of modern colour theory is based on the foundations that were laid a long time ago. Understanding where those foundations come from is therefore a good idea, because it allows you to know exactly how your particular discipline evolved over time. Whether this will help you specifically in some way is not guaranteed, but it is an interesting topic nonetheless.
As to the actual theory, understanding how colour theory works is a way of training yourself to make good decisions about colour usage in the future. While an understanding of which colours look good together is something that is innate to a certain degree, studying colour theory will at the very least allow you to train a certain minimum level of taste in colours into your graphic design game.
A Brief Summary of Colour Theory History
Justin Lemaire
Here’s a brief summary of the last few posts in terms of a timeline for people that have been having trouble following the basic history.
1810: Goethe publishes Theory of Colours, in which he discusses the original RYB system of primary colours and all of the investigations that took place over the 18th century in an attempt to augment what was known about colour theory.
1839: Chevreul publishes The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast, which summarizes a number of important observations regarding what was known about colour theory up to that point in time.
Late 1800s: As investigation regarding the nature of colour and colour mixing continues, the original RYB system of primaries begins to be replaced by the RGB system of primaries as scientific investigations of monochromatic light begin to suggest that the latter is a better way to classify other colours.
1900s: As the electronic age begins to come about and colour televisions begin to be mass produced, the RGB system of colour completely supplants the RYB system in most areas of professional life. Later on when colour printers become popular, the CMY and CMYK systems are also introduced, allowing for much better colour printing.
Another System of Primaries
Justin Lemaire
In the previous post, we talked about the red-green-blue and red-yellow-blue systems of primary colours. These systems are systems that you are going to encounter throughout your life as a graphic designer and while you will more often see the RGB system (you will in fact always see this when you do electronic graphic design), the RYB system is still used enough that knowing about its existence is worthwhile. However, just because we humans enjoy making things difficult, there is a wholly separate system of primaries for printer use.
The history of this third system is similar to the history of the RGB system. The RGB system was created through science as a better way of describing other colours and for that reason replaced the RYB system in a number of different areas. Likewise, it has since been discovered that the use of red, green and blue in printer ink is not the optimal way to create new colours either from the point of view of economics or from the point of view of colour mixing. In printing therefore, the average colour printer will have ink nozzles for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These colours are collectively known as the CMYK system and represent the third system of primaries.
The Basics of Colour Theory
Justin Lemaire
As previously mentioned, colour theory is based primarily on historical precedent with colours that was discovered through scientific means and then transposed onto the art scene. Perhaps the one exception to this idea is the basic principle of colour theory that still exists to this very day, the principle of primary colours.
Primary colours, also known by some as primitive colours, are red, yellow and blue. They are red, green and blue in computer terms, but in terms of colour mixing yellow has always been the third primary colour as opposed to green. The reason that these three colours are referred to as the primary colours is because in the 19th century it was believed that these colours could be used to form all of the other colours on Earth.
This was the earliest form of expression when it came to primary colours and it was only later through science that red, green and blue were established as being a better way to view the colour chart from a primary position. This is why there are two different sets of primary colours, one of which you learn about in art school and one of which you learn about in science class.
Introduction to Colour Theory
Justin Lemaire
The last few posts on this blog have given you the opportunity to get out of the theory of graphic design and take a look at it from the perspective of someone in the practical world that has practical concerns related to the business. While that type of look can be a sobering one, it is also something that must be done every now and then. Now that we’ve accomplished an introduction to the practical considerations of graphic design however, it is time to plough ahead into the next major topic of graphic design. That of course is colour theory.
Colour theory, simply put, is a theory centered on the idea that colours can be mixed together in order to create different and new colours that are more pleasing to the human eye in certain situations. While many people think of it as being specific to painting, the truth is that colour theory is arguably a scientific discovery through the field of optics. The discovery of what happens to light when it goes through a prism and the resulting spectrum sparked a lot of scientific inquiry into the nature of colours and a lot of what emerged was then used as a starting point to the formation of the modern artistic colour theory. It is that theory that we will be covering over the next few weeks at Concept Wizards.
