Endless Definitions and Image Restoration (29th - 30th November)

The week started with a presentation on fonts I know very little about fonts and only know the basic Times New Roman and Arial fonts. I have discovered over the last few weeks that fonts are a lot more important than I first imagined. After this we were able to concentrate on our assignment A3. For me this was trying to simplify my definitions in a way that would suit my target audience. This was split up by a demonstration on how to use the tools of Photoshop we will need to complete our other assignment A4.

Thursday started with a talk on what we must do for our Photoshop work, we were given an old image and told to rotate, crop, create a border, retouch scratches, blemishes, fold lines, adjust levels of, contrast, brightness, sharpness and finally add colour to the image.

After college I went to work as usual. After work at around half 10, I’m usually exhausted and just want to fall asleep in front of the TV but for sum reason all I wanted to do was add colour to the image. I spent around 3 hours on this from around 12pm to 3am.

I enjoy the lectures first thing on a morning because they always give me something new to think about. The work for A3 over the past couple of weeks I have not enjoyed doing. Each description only has to be 75words long but it is the research and then trying to put everything in your own words seemed to drag on an on.

I think I may have made a couple of errors in my definitions by making them too technical. I am going to look back through them and change the language a little so they would suit my inexperienced target audience more. This is annoying but something that needs to be done.

I went home Wednesday evening pleased with myself that the definitions were all complete and looking forward to the next day because it would be my first serious look at Photoshop. I liked working with Photoshop all morning it wasn’t until after dinner when I started stressing about small blemishes that I could see when zoomed in.

Colouring the image also was very stressful I found each colour I added to the image turned out to be too bright and unnatural. The image as it stands now is below I would take anyone’s feeling on how to improve it onboard. I still think I have someway to go but it is a good contrast to the original.

The colour I added to the image on the monitors at college changed completely when I opened the image on my laptop at home. This surprised me but it does give me first hand experience of how colour can change depending on the computer settings and the monitor it is viewed on.

I think working on Photoshop until 3am was not the best way to work as my eyes would have been tired and my senses muted. If I was to do it all again I would wait till the morning. I have found I am defiantly a night time person. I don’t like getting up but find it hard to get to sleep on a night at times so I often find myself working till the early hours of the morning.

I no conclusion I am happy about how the two assignment are progressing an I’m glad we are starting to reach a more design orientated part of the course as the next few weeks is all about screen designs and Photoshop work.

I am going to create a feedback sheet that I can hand out to people to get there feedback on my designs. It will be a quick and simple way of getting specific feedback that I can use and hopefully achieve at least one of the merit criteria.