HYPERLINKS
On the Board for Today
- Course overview
- Setting up Photoshop
- Image Size Basics
- Colour Fundamentals
- Image sharpening
Computer Graphics Three
| TOPIC | VALUE |
|---|---|
| Group Project: Graphics Fundamentals | 10% |
| Project: Photo Montage | 20% |
| In-Class Exercise: Colour Correction | 5% |
| Project: Web Page Mockup Design | 25% |
| Project: DVD Package Design | 25% |
| In-Class Exercise: Colour Correction | 5% |
| In-Class Exercise Spot Colour Channels | 5% |
| TOTAL | 100% |
File Release Checklist
This file is presented as a guide to the student who is handing in a project in the Graphic Design program. If you deviate from the specifications below, make sure your are comforming to the teacher’s instructions. Otherwise, make sure that a stranger could make sense of what your are handing in.
Spot Colour Channels
Every Photoshop image has one or more channels, each storing information about colour elements in the image. The number of default colour channels in an image depends on its colour mode. For example, a CMYK image has at least four channels, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black information. Think of a channel as analogous to a plate in the printing process, with a separate plate applying each layer of colour.
Spot colour channels can be added to add spot colour plates for printing.
Selecting
Having trouble deciding how to select part of your image? Photoshop gives you several tools that help you target just the areas you need to select. In this tutorial, you'll learn about the best way to use each of the selection tools.
Light Blast
Looking for a way to give some extra "life" to a logo or type treatment? The two most common techniques to help a logo standout are a glowing edge or a drop shadow. This is based on the principle of type on pattern, which says that a contrasting edge makes it far easier to see something when it is positioned over a busy or moving background. But why be ordinary? By backlighting an image, we can dramatically offset it from its background. Photoshop works with almost any logo or type treatment.
Mask Details No Bigger than a hair
The true power of masking in Adobe Photoshop resides in its ability to use an image to select itself. We use colour channels to select the normaly 'unselectable': hair.
Colour Correction
Does your photo look dull, lacking contrast? Or, does it have a colour cast? Is it reddish or greenish? Using the Levels command, and others, in Photoshop you can correct the tonal range and colour balance of an image by adjusting intensity levels of the image's shadows, midtones, and highlights.
Creative Cropping
In this technique, I'd like to show you how I use scanned images or paint with artistic brushes to creatively crop photographs in Photoshop. Warning: This technique is addictive. After using this technique a few times, you might get bored with rectangular photographs.
Smoke and Fire
It's used in sacred ceremonies. It's used to cleanse. It's linked to the spirit world. It makes breath visible. It's a sign of danger. Fire precedes it. It's pollution. It stops breath. Smoke is a powerful symbol. Now you'll be able to paint it.
Remove Red Eye
There's nothing more frustrating than having a great picture ruined when a person's eyes come out bright red. Photoshop gives you a simple way to fix red-eye using Adjustment Layers. In this class, you'll learn how to use the tool to fix red-eye in just a few steps.
Vector Shapes
Adobe Photoshop makes it easy to add shapes to an image: you can draw them using a variety of shape tools, or select from a large assortment of predrawn shapes. You can arrange vector shapes on separate layers for easy modification and overlay effects. In this class, you'll add both background and foreground shapes to an image and create some flair with gradient and layer effects.
Watch the Podcast: Vector Tools
Watch the Podcast: Vector Photo Frame
Watch the Podcast: Vector: Warp Type
Metal Type
The effect in this exercise is as widely used as the drop shadow. Metallic type can be found in car ads, CD covers, and movie logos. A glance through any magazine will produce a myriad of examples. There will be many intermediate steps to this exercise. Keep in mind that the end result is not really what is important here but rather the steps. Using Adobe Photoshop to produce these steps with a minor alteration—as the use of a different colour—will provide the solution to many other situations.
Posterize
This tip and technique demonstrates how to reduce the colour palette of an image to create a posterized effect with the most control possible. Although Photoshop has a filter that automatically creates posterized images, it works on all channels simultaneously. The unique approach described here, allows for more flexibility by converting an image to grayscale so that the number of posterized levels can be specifically applied and colours assigned as desired.
Lens Blur
This photograph shows a plant on a table on a balcony against a tropical backdrop, and I would like everything in the background to appear more out of focus. If I was to use the Gaussian blur filter, I could easily make the background appear blurred, but the overall result would not actually look particularly convincing. Here I want to introduce the Lens blur filter. Because with the Lens blur filter, it is now possible to create realistic-looking blurs that make designated areas of the image look as if they were shot out of focus.
Mirror Effect
"It's all done with mirrors" is a popular saying among professional magicians. Well, these days, digital photography artists are using mirrors, of sorts, to create magical effects on their computer monitors. Basically, a mirror image is one in which one side of a frame is perfectly mirrored (reflected) on the opposite side of the frame—side to side or top to bottom. In Photoshop, we use Canvas Size, Copy and Paste to create the effect. It's that easy!