What Did I Learn...? All in all, I'm pretty sure I learned more from these tutorials than I think. There are still many concepts, options, etc. that I don't have any clue how to use. HOWEVER, here is a list of some that I do know how to use because of the tutorials :> :
Healing brush
Patch tool
Layer masks
Inverting selections
Hue/Saturation
Cropping canvases
Probably more
Most Important Tools (For Me)
Three key tools out of all those up there ↑ would definitely be layer masks, the patch tool, and the healing brush. To me, these are the most important tools because not only are they pretty easy to use, but they can help your picture look all dolled up and fancy, like cleaning up the kid's face in the black and white picture. The patch feature can help replace a certain area with another so it will blend in more with the background (if that makes sense), the healing brush can make your face look less greasy, etc., and the layer masks can just make your picture look super neat like in the picture below ↓ with the tree coming out of the guy's neck. It's really not as hard as it sounds!
Favoritism There definitely are so many Photoshop tools that I really value, but my favorite has to be the layer mask. It was tough to learn, especially with a project as big as the one with the girl in black, but as soon as I got used to using it, it was a really interesting tool. When I use it in future projects, it will certainly be helpful if I need to get a picture of someone or something and a fancy background to go with it. I can't really explain it all that well to be honest. Strengths/Weaknesses I honestly think that I have more weaknesses than strengths when it comes to this, but I can't tell you what they all are. I'm a slow worker, especially with programs like Photoshop. However, I think this is sort of a good thing because it shows that I pay a lot of attention to and care about what I'm doing. Another one of my strengths is that if I didn't understand how to do something that was done in the video (more specifically, the videos about the girl in black haha), I looked it up online instead of complaining about it. I also kind of had trouble figuring out the Hue/Saturation layer after being finished with the girl in black, but after messing around a little bit, I figured it out. Other than that, nothing specific (i.e. certain tools, etc.) really comes to mind. Pick Something Different! I'm assuming that with the question, "What would you do different? Why?" you are asking about the final challenge to just do whatever with the pictures given to us. Well, sort of. I kind of wish I cropped the picture a little bit on the left so that the man would be more in the center. There isn't much else I would change about it.
Stay the Same! The roots! I would definitely keep the roots. Before actually making them come out of the man's neck, I thought it would really neat, but not so much afterward. I was in a rush to finish it, and I wish I made the neck and the tree blend in better with each other. Although, now that I think about it, it looks pretty cool and I don't think anybody else did it. Et Cetera As much as I didn't like doing this project, I sincerely think it helped me learn the Photoshop skills I've wanted for years. - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
BabyVac by Team 1 Nearing the end of the school year, finals are bound to come up. For e-Comm, our final was to present a made up product with a pre-assembled team. Our product was the BabyVac (the Baby Mop was already taken), which is basically a portable vacuum attached to a onesie. When the baby crawls around, it cleans your floors (amazing am I right????). Totally original.
Team Work Overall, our group effort was alright; it wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. Distractions would come about every so often, but for the most part, we worked hard to make our presentation funny and well-designed. Next Time... I think that if I were to be put in a group like this again, I hope that I would try to get people more on track rather than just sitting there and watching a couple people in my group slack off. I don't want to have to work as much to get other people's parts done tbh!! Improvements Becca and I spent a lot of time working on the commercial, so I think I know a lot more about Final Cut than I did before (merging clips, etc.). I now also sort of know how to make a sphere in SketchUp, but since it didn't end up in the final animation, that doesn't really matter.
Production Making this really didn't take all that long, somewhere around an hour I think. Anyways, making this was pretty easy, but I have one thing I would like to complain about. The oNE THIng I wanted to do as leader was make the gunshot a fart noise but NOOOOOOO. That didn't happen. :'> How Did It Turn Out? The video's pretty ok actually (other than the fact there wasn't a fart noise in it). We all agreed that the main music that should be played should be kazoo music, because it's really funny of course. Other than that, you can watch the video and see for yourself.
Video Instead of just taking pictures of what a shot was supposed to look like, we had to make a 30 second video (with a story-line) that includes all 6 camera shots, which include:
Dreamweaver Near the end of second semester, my class and I worked with a somewhat complicated application (all the button things were too hard to find) called Dreamweaver. This software made it so that you could create your own website!! Isn't that neat!! \ (•◡•) / Making My Website The whole point of this was to make an "about me" page, so I copied and pasted my elevator pitch, a swaggin' picture of my good looking face, and my mini bio. To make it look not-boring, I played around with the background colors to make it have a fun atmosphere even though there isn't that much to talk about. To make the text fit in with the colors, I made changed the font to make it look softer and made my descriptions pink. Afterwards, I added a project page where I could put my favorite projects from each section of e-Comm and made the colors the same as the home page.
ごめん！ I'm not going to apologize for acting like a huge weab when I did that, but I'm sorry for not finishing this before school ended!! I meant to do it over break but I kept forgetting to. I swear. - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
Process First off, I made a giant rectangle that would be the base of my house (I don't remember the dimensions). I rose it up 8 feet, then made a line [hotdog style] on the top of my house and moved it upwards another 8 feet. Then, I made the outlines for all of the windows and doors, spending a lot of time trying to figure out where they would go. To make the frames for all of them, I used the tool 'offset'. Since I was in a hurry to put color on it, that's exactly what I did next. Afterwards, I put in a dog for every window :>. Next, I made the gutters on the sides of the roof and made steps for the doors. Making the back porch, which I did after making the steps, was probably the easiest part of the house to make, however it wasn't needed. Lastly, I downloaded some flower and tree models from the 3D Warehouse and put them in to make them look all pretty like.
Not So Quick Note I really did not intend for this to take that long...I just wanted it to be holiday themed. Unfortunately, Halloween was almost two months ago so posting this in the middle of December probably has no effect whatsoever. Process I started off by typing in my name and changing it from text to a picture. Afterwards, I made some arcs to help me figure out where the pumpkin would be falling/bouncing. Creating the frames of the pumpkin falling/bouncing was pretty easy, but the next step is what took me so dang* long. I wanted to make it look like ghosts were coming out of the pumpkin, and since ghosts are usually portrayed as transparent, I set the color of the brush to black and switched it to 23% opacity so that it would look like the ghosts were fading into the background. I then copied the text layer several times and basically did the same thing, except it was fading in instead of out. Lastly, I made all the frames into layers and went from there. Also... All in all, I thought that this was a pretty fun project (because of the ghosts :>) but I'm not proud about it being almost 2 months since I was supposed to turn it in. However, I do feel much better about it considering how it turned out. - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
There definitely are so many Photoshop tools that I really value, but my favorite has to be the layer mask. It was tough to learn, especially with a project as big as the one with the girl in black, but as soon as I got used to using it, it was a really interesting tool. When I use it in future projects, it will certainly be helpful if I need to get a picture of someone or something and a fancy background to go with it. I can't really explain it all that well to be honest.
