Photoshop Refresher Lesson

In today’s lecture we had a Photoshop refresher lesson. In the lecture we would refresh on how to take an image from the web for our own use. We all started by going on to Google and searched for an image, “Work Load."

We all used the same image. We needed a big image to play with. Although size is not as important for online students, it is for print. Our images size is 400 X 400. When searching for images you can use the refine your image search tool, this enables you to only choose certain images based on their size etc. So this is a good tool for only searching big images.

An issue we do have to think about is copyright. “Copyright is a form of intellectual property that gives the author of an original workexclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain.” Although this isn’t such a problem for print students, as their work will not be public. For us online, our website will be live, so we have to be careful.

Next you open the photograph in Photoshop. As we plan to use the image online it has to be in RGB mode (red, green, blue). When you open Photoshop if it’s not set in RGB mode, you can change the mode by selecting image, and then follow the dropdown menu to mode, then change.
By clicking on image, image size, you will see a box. This box shows us everything we need to know about our image. All images go down to dots. Resolution. You can never add resolution, you can only work with the dots you have.

When editing using the levels, curves and colour balance allow you to make very useful edits. Sometimes this can even save a picture. Another handy tool is the marquee tool, this allows you to cut out areas of the images and then edit then separately, without changing the rest of the photograph. This is very good if you want to lighten up an area of the photograph as you plan to put text over the top of it.

When you save your image the filename is also important. It is best to give you filename something very appropriate and short. As when selecting an image from files, you can usually only see the beginning of the name. So having a long, complicated name will be difficult for you to see, as well as remember. Also when saving for online, you should save – using web & devices. This will give you a good saved web address for example it will have no gaps.

To finish we were reminded to always save the original image, just in case!

First Lesson

For our group project we have to create a website. First of all as there is 8 people who have chosen to do online, we had to decided if we wished to work in 2 smaller groups or one big one. In the end we decided to work as one big group. The main idea behind this is because of content. The more people in the group the more content we can have. This will make the site more like an actual running site, than a student project.

We discussed what we want on our site, we know we want videos and podcasts to make the site full of multimedia. We also discussed on having a twitter account for our site. Although originally we were unsure what we wanted the site to be about. We ended up going for a site on future trends. This meant that we could each be an editor of our own section. We wanted to create an online magazine.

We then categorized the site with each of us being editors.

I'm Lifestyle.

Eoin is Gaming.

Jenn is Green Issues.

Joe is Sport.

Max. Entertainment.

Paul is Media & Culture.

We'll sort out Ken & Emilys next lesson.

We have decided to use Word Press for our site. We decided this as Word Press is more real life, it's what they use in the real world. We decided not to use Dream Weaver as the main problem with it is uploading content. Only one person can upload, whereas with Word Press we can all upload. This gives us a lot more freedom. This way we can all edit more, its our content so we can edit it. I feel this is really good, as its a group project we should all have the chance to upload and edit our own work.

Deadline

Deadline is 4pm Friday 18th December.