GMD 341 Advanced Imaging
This is my DeVry University GMD 341 course work page. On this page I will be uploading weekly assignments for inspection and review, as well as keeping an archive of past assignments.
Week 7 Chapter Assignments
This week's chapter assignments were mostly review. We covered lessons 3, 7, and 8. lesson 3 was an introduction to Adobe Bridge, something that we have already been using through out the entire course, so I found it a bit interesting that we were learning about it now, at the end of the course. We covered topics like creating and moving folders, adding things to the favorites list, as well as changing, and copying metadata for groups of images. Lesson 7 was review, we first covered lesson 7 in week 1 and it dealt with image manipulation and adjustments, the section we covered dealt with curing red-eye effects, and changing file formats from camera raw to a more universal .dng file. Lesson 8 was all about clipping masks and making the best use of them to create interesting image effects. Image 1 for lesson 8 shows how through the use of multiple clipping masks you can create an interesting blur effect that was not present in the original image, as well as create a vibrant composition.
Week 7 iLab
This iLab was fantastic, a real good exercise in the use of clipping masks, and a nice way for me to stretch my creative legs and create an interesting promotional Ad. I had to do a bit of brainstorming for this week’s iLab mostly because it was so open ended and there were so many good possibilities. I decided that I wanted to do a new twist on an old favorite of mine, Jet Moto, a game made for the Sony Playstation in 1996. I considered a lot of design choices, but finally settled on a late 90’s style full page magazine promotion look. These used to be quite common in video game magazines in order to advertise, and hype an upcoming game launch. The common elements are the game logo, a quote or two from other video game journalistic sources that give the game praise, a block or two of descriptive advertising text, and a video game screenshot or two. The final piece, which turned out to be the largest, is a piece of art related to the game, this can be a character, an object, or an environment. I went with a character, I this case the Kawasaki brand hoverbike driver Wild Ride. I pulled her picture from the art located in the back of the original video game cd through the use of a very detailed clipping mask. Once I had her picture anchored in the bottom of the image I went about organizing and placing my other elements to create a realistic semi-modern advertisement. I wanted to keep some of that 90’s charm, so I had a checkerboard background accented by a grayscale gradient, and the gold text that stood out and was eye-catching. I added some modern flairs by using translucent text boxes to frame content, and the large “Free to Play” button looking object in the lower right, making this piece seem like it could be a retro-web ad as well. All in all this was a great iLab and I had a lot of fun creating it.
Week 6 Chapter Assignments
For this week's chapter assignments we revisited chapter 5 for some vector practice in photoshop, and made great use of smart objects and image manipulation in chapter 10. Chapter 5 was pretty daunting a few weeks ago when we first tackled it, I still do not think that photoshop is any kind of ideal environment for vector work, and I struggled quite a bit with getting the pen tool to cooperate with me. Most of what we did in lesson 5 was creating selections through the use of the pen tool, and then manipulating those selections via adjustment layers to get the final effect, this is evidenced in both of the lesson 5 images presented below.
Lesson 10 was quite a lot of fun, I have been using photoshop for years, but I have rarely ever used smart objects, and after this lesson I think I will be using them quite a bit more. Like the built-in layer functionality, smart objects offer a way to manipulate images in a non-destructive way. They do this by creating a working copy of the image you import, and then referencing back to the original image whenever you need to make a "destructive" change. You can also batch-load images via smart objects and cut down on a lot of redundant image editing to save time.
Lesson 10 was quite a lot of fun, I have been using photoshop for years, but I have rarely ever used smart objects, and after this lesson I think I will be using them quite a bit more. Like the built-in layer functionality, smart objects offer a way to manipulate images in a non-destructive way. They do this by creating a working copy of the image you import, and then referencing back to the original image whenever you need to make a "destructive" change. You can also batch-load images via smart objects and cut down on a lot of redundant image editing to save time.
Week 6 iLab
This iLab was quite a bit of fun for me, I have a good amount of experience with vector graphics and I like the open-ended nature of this iLab. The first thing I set about doing was figuring out what I would be creating to fulfill the iLab requirements. The goal was to create a representational map, of either a local area, or an indoor space. Early on I decided upon creating a representation of my room, since I know it pretty well, and I figured it would make for a neat vector piece. The iLab called for the creation of a “map”, however upon looking at fellow student’s submissions and doing a bit of thinking I decided upon the idea that I could create a to-scale representation of my room with a 3D look to it that could serve as a map if needed, instead of a flat 2D overhead view I laid down some perspective lines and made sure to place and scale objects as close as possible to their real life equivalents. I wanted to create a view of my room that could be used as reference without needing to be overly abstract. Once I had the items blocked out I went about coloring them, making sure to tweak opacity for large foreground objects, and add shading to create further grounding effects and give the room a more solid presence. I toyed around with adding items but it did nothing but add a lot of clutter to the composition and detract from its usefulness as a representational map.
Week 5 Chapter Assignments
Lesson 12 dealt with a few interesting topics related to working with photoshop. Part 1 of lesson 12, which resulted in Image 1 dealt with the creation of a small, but functional website within photoshop using text manipulation, guides, and slicing an image into smaller segments that are then converted into hyperlink buttons for the use of navigation. Image 2 for lesson 12 is an example of a video ready image which has a separate alpha channel saved out as a .tif. We also were tasked to create a frame by frame animation within photoshop which Image 3 demonstrates. An animated gif with 7 frames of animation, 5 of which are a tween between two images. Lastly the final segment of lesson 12 tasked us with creating a video in which a title segment fades into view at the bottom of the frame and stays there, something that could easily be used in a number of different scenarios.
Week 5 iLab
I can’t say that this iLab was problem free this week. I had some early problems dealing with image editing through the animation panel with Citrix. Because of this I ended up opting to edit each image individually by adding adjustments layers and then saving them all out and creating a new image sequence out of the newly adjusted images. Once back into the animation panel I went ahead and applied filters to each image, and then exported the video as instructed.
For my filter choices I decided to apply a single artistic filter to each image to try to get the most out of each image through a specific filter. I spent a good deal of time selecting a best fit filter for each image, tweaking it to bring the most out of the image, and making sure that it looked good against the other images. I purposefully stayed away from some of the more potent filters because I felt that they took too much away from the improvements I had made to the images, and added too much of a visual clash between each image as they progressed through the video, so there is no use of plastic wrap, no glowing edges, or neon filters.
For my filter choices I decided to apply a single artistic filter to each image to try to get the most out of each image through a specific filter. I spent a good deal of time selecting a best fit filter for each image, tweaking it to bring the most out of the image, and making sure that it looked good against the other images. I purposefully stayed away from some of the more potent filters because I felt that they took too much away from the improvements I had made to the images, and added too much of a visual clash between each image as they progressed through the video, so there is no use of plastic wrap, no glowing edges, or neon filters.
Week 4 Chapter Assignments
I really enjoyed lesson 11, not only was it short and sweet, but it dealt with one of my favorite photoshop play-things, filters. I also thought that the little monster images provided were pretty fun to work with and added a lot of personality to the finished piece, something that a lot of these chapter assignments sorely lack. My method for Lesson 11 Image 1 was pretty straight forward, I applied the necessary filters to each monster as instructed, making sure to input the correct values, and make sure that I was stacking filters in the correct order (doing otherwise leads to different results). The monster in the lower right was pretty interesting because it required the use of a motion blur interacting with a gradient in order to achieve a specific look. I had a lot of fun playing around with those two things to get different looks with the motion blur.
Lesson 13 I didn't like so much, while it dealt with 3D, one of my favorite graphics topics, my copy of photoshop lacked the capability to complete this lesson and I was forced to do it on Citrix, a less than stellar experience. As well parts of the lesson are still not working correctly for me, impeding my ability to get them done and posted up here. For part 1 of lesson 13 I opted to upload a .avi file that I rendered out of photoshop and host it on you tube, the lesson was about putting 3D graphics in motion in photoshop, so I felt that it was fitting to show that here on my website.
Lesson 13 I didn't like so much, while it dealt with 3D, one of my favorite graphics topics, my copy of photoshop lacked the capability to complete this lesson and I was forced to do it on Citrix, a less than stellar experience. As well parts of the lesson are still not working correctly for me, impeding my ability to get them done and posted up here. For part 1 of lesson 13 I opted to upload a .avi file that I rendered out of photoshop and host it on you tube, the lesson was about putting 3D graphics in motion in photoshop, so I felt that it was fitting to show that here on my website.
Week 4 iLab
I had nothing but problems with the iLab this week. My copy of photoshop wasn’t equipped with the 3D tools, which is a major let-down considering how much it cost me. Citrix, while wonderful for using in a jam like this is really slow, occasionally buggy and frustrating to find files with. Regardless I felt really good with this iLab once I got to working on it. I come from a background heavy in 3D modeling and animation so this kind of stuff is familiar to me. The first thing I set about doing was to establish the shot that I wanted to make, and that was determined by two things, the dimensions of the image (10in tall by 7 wide) and the required object (the desk). With these two things in mind I decided that the best shot I could compose would be an angled shot from above that showed off the most objects and allowed me to scale them with minimal clutter. I set about tweaking the lights, dragging the primary light over to the left side of the image, high, so that it would illuminate the top of the desk. The secondary light I dragged down into the lower left corner to eliminate as many of those nasty pitch black shadows as I could. I amped up the brightness on both lights, and added a hint of blue to the primary light, and a bit of yellow to the secondary in order to add more warmth to the composition. Once I started importing other items I made sure that they were aligned to the same lines as the desk so that nothing looked like it was skewed randomly. I also paid close attention to the scale of items in order to make the image look as realistic as possible in proportion. Originally I had all of the items colored in very bland typical office colors for realism sake, but I realized that it was best to color-code each to show how many imported items I had and make them pop out from the desk. Lastly I tweaked my final composition by adding a ground plane and a wall plane to better show my alignment, and I added Mr. Smokey in there for the sake of polish.
Week 3 Chapter Assignments
Week 3 iLab
For this week’s iLab we were tasked with creating custom brushes in a few different ways, and creating a “brush sampler” document to show how each of our brushes worked when painted with. To create the first two brushes I opened the brush options panel and enabled shape dynamics, scattering, and dual brush modes. In these modes I tweaked settings, and pushed buttons until I got a brush that felt interesting enough to paint with. I made two brushes in this fashion and created fitting demonstrations of what each did. For my first brush I basically created an unstable jittery hard brush, so I drew a couple of free form shapes with it, and added color. I also painted in a set of low opacity diagonal lines to show how the brush looked in a long line, which shows off its jittery attributes. My second brush was a highly scattered brush that produced a “droplet” effect like moving a wet paintbrush above a surface and having paint drops rain down in a line. I created a simple 2-tone, 1-color vertical line to show the scattering effect. I also used this second sample image as my texture template for my 3rd brush. Using that texture template, with some offset manipulations I was able to create a texture brush that was free of any jarring edges that would give it away. I then swapped its mode to give it a more distinct look and painted with it.
Week 2 Chapter Assignments
This week's chapter assignments covered Lessons 4, 5, and 6 and dealt with a number of topics including, image composition, selection techniques, painting, and image correction methods.
Lesson 4 was a crash course in basic photoshop image composition. In Image 1 we were tasked with taking three independent images, one of a barn, a cow, and a chicken respectively and combining them with some text to form the final image. In order to do this I had to input each image component into a master .psd file, manipulate the size of each image component, remove any unwanted white space, and finally tweak them to make them appear more at home in the background image.
Lesson 5 dealt with selections, manipulating individual parts of a larger image, and using a variety of selection techniques. Image 1 for lesson 5 shows the end result of using the marquee tool to select areas of an image, and then manipulate those areas independently. Image 2 is a an image of a kite that has been sharpened against an unaffected background due to selection inversion. Image 3 shows a complex component of a larger image being removed from its background through the smart selection tool. Image 6 for lesson 5 is a duck that has been plucked out of its original image through a painted mask, and has been transposed into an image of penguins. Lastly image 8 shows a single altered apple amidst a number of apples through the use of curves as a selection device.
Lesson 6 is an introduction to digital painting and image clean-up techniques. Image 2 is an example of minor additions that can be made to an existing image through the use of just the brush tool. Image 3 (my personal favorite of this lesson) is an exercise in applying color to a black and white photograph by using color mode to incorporate the grey scale data into the painting process. Finally image 5 for lesson 6 shows a before and after look at an old photograph that has been mended through the use of a number of different tools, such as the clone stamp, spot healing brush, and the patch heal tool, with an addition of an ornate pattern cloned in from a separate image.
Lesson 4 was a crash course in basic photoshop image composition. In Image 1 we were tasked with taking three independent images, one of a barn, a cow, and a chicken respectively and combining them with some text to form the final image. In order to do this I had to input each image component into a master .psd file, manipulate the size of each image component, remove any unwanted white space, and finally tweak them to make them appear more at home in the background image.
Lesson 5 dealt with selections, manipulating individual parts of a larger image, and using a variety of selection techniques. Image 1 for lesson 5 shows the end result of using the marquee tool to select areas of an image, and then manipulate those areas independently. Image 2 is a an image of a kite that has been sharpened against an unaffected background due to selection inversion. Image 3 shows a complex component of a larger image being removed from its background through the smart selection tool. Image 6 for lesson 5 is a duck that has been plucked out of its original image through a painted mask, and has been transposed into an image of penguins. Lastly image 8 shows a single altered apple amidst a number of apples through the use of curves as a selection device.
Lesson 6 is an introduction to digital painting and image clean-up techniques. Image 2 is an example of minor additions that can be made to an existing image through the use of just the brush tool. Image 3 (my personal favorite of this lesson) is an exercise in applying color to a black and white photograph by using color mode to incorporate the grey scale data into the painting process. Finally image 5 for lesson 6 shows a before and after look at an old photograph that has been mended through the use of a number of different tools, such as the clone stamp, spot healing brush, and the patch heal tool, with an addition of an ornate pattern cloned in from a separate image.
Week 2 iLab
In our iLab this week we were tasked with creating an advertisement for a real estate development company. We were given a set of three different background images, all of which were in poor shape, and a word document containing information to be placed on the ad. I started my iLab by cleaning up and improving one of the background images, making sure to bring out as much color as I could, white still maintaining the realistic tones of the image. Next I imported the text, formatted it into useful blocks, and then set about applying layer styles. I wanted to make sure that my ad had good readability so I put a translucent block behind my main paragraph text, and made sure to have promotional and title text that was contrasted correctly against both the background sky, and the grass. Lastly I used the custom shape tool to create some icons that gave the ad more personality.
Week 1 Chapter Assignments
This week's chapter assignments covered two lessons, lesson 7 dealt with image correction in the form of histogram manipulation, curve control, and levels, as well as correcting for red-eye in photographs, and manipulating camera specific file-formats. Image 1 for lesson 7 shows the before and after results of using those methods to clean up a stock photograph in order to bring out more color, add contrast, and create a sharper image. Image 2 shows a before and after view of red-eye correcting using a healing tool, and image 3 shows the end result of utilizing Adobe Photoshop's camera raw format plug-in to translate a proprietary format into a universal digital negative, as well as a workable .psd.
Lesson 9 dealt with layer control and image manipulation through adjustment layers. Image 1 for lesson 9 shows how the use of the selection tool, with a hue adjustment layer can change the color of a specific part of an image without changing the rest of the image in the process. Image 2 demonstrates how adjustment layers can be used to stack various layer styles and effects to create interesting images with many effects.
Lesson 9 dealt with layer control and image manipulation through adjustment layers. Image 1 for lesson 9 shows how the use of the selection tool, with a hue adjustment layer can change the color of a specific part of an image without changing the rest of the image in the process. Image 2 demonstrates how adjustment layers can be used to stack various layer styles and effects to create interesting images with many effects.
Week 1 iLab
Our iLab for this week covered the manipulation of an image through the use of the histogram, the curve panel, and the level panel. We were given a stock photo of what looks like some kind of deer or antelope, and we were charged with improving the image through each of the tools listed. We were also tasked with creating an "abstract" version of the original picture by creating a complex set of curves with at least 6 manipulation points. While the end effect of such a curve usually resembles the output created when someone just haphazardly messes around with the curve editor, there was some thought behind my abstract piece. My goal was to bring out the color yellow in a strong way, while not introducing any blues / reds / purples to the image. I did this through the use of a 7 point high-band curve that located the strong yellow and green segments of the histogram and exaggerated their influence in the image.
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LinkedIn: Alan Remien
E-Mail: [email protected]
DeviantArt: http://hard-won-fame.deviantart.com/