Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Vector Self Portrait

This assignment introduced me into the differences of a raster and a vector. First I went into Photo Shop and adjusted the hue and saturation of my self. I then adjusted the levels of the image and saved it as a psd file. I then opened up Adobe Illustrator and placed the photo on a letter page. I used the Image Trace drop box and picked three different types of settings for my picture and saved them as both as an Adobe Illustrator file, and a jpg. After I used the Direct Tool and filled in selected areas of my photo with different colors. Finally I modified the points on the image so that parts of the images look stretched.

  • A raster image is an image that has pixels. It can also be called bitmap.
  • A vector is an image that has objects and points, not pixels. 


 16 colors: Trace Result with Outline






16 colors: Trace Result

 3 colors: Trace Result


Thursday, September 24, 2015

Clone Tool

In Photoshop, there is a tool called the Clone Tool. By holding down the the option key while clicking the desired area you'd like to clone, it selects that part of the image, and your able to put the clone anywhere on the image. The brush sizes are useful in helping you get the appropriate size brush for the item you're cloning. There is also a hardness scale that lets you choose how sharp, or how faded the cloned item is. On the image below, I used the cloning tool to clone my eyes and mouth.


Liquify Filter

In Photoshop, there is a filter called Liquify that allows you to do a number of different effects to an image. There is the Forward Warp Tool which drags a selected area of an image out, but it doesn't change the number of pixels. The Reconstruct tool lets you fix anything that you may have made a mistake. The Pucker Tool pinches a selected area to make it look smaller. The Bloat Tool makes the area selected look abnormally bigger. The Push Left Tool pushes the areas you want to the left side of the image. The Zoom Tool helps you move in and out of the picture. On the photo below,  I used the Forward Warp, Pucker, and Bloat tools.






GIF Colors and Quality

For this assignment, I used the Cutout filter in Photoshop, but instead of saving the image as a jpg, I saved it as a GIF. In terms of Indexed Color, it allows the colors values of an image to have 0 to 256 colors. I have two different images that i selected to have two different color values.

Filter Cutout Gif with 6 colors

File size: 16 KB

The quality of this image isn't great do to only using 6 colors, so it makes a lot of the images details look washed out such as my nose and mouth area. The file size is of this image is small due to the limited amount of colors in the photo




Filter Cutout Gif with 200 colors

File size: 49 KB

The quality of this picture is better than the one above do since there are 200 colors in this image. Since there is more colors, it give the items in this picture more detail such as my nose and mouth. The file size is bigger than the previous photo due to the fact that there is more information (color) in this image.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

JPG Compression and File Size

For this assignment, the goal was become exposed to filters in Photoshop. I selected a selfie, put the cutout filter on it, and adjusted the quality of the three different JPGs. The difference between quality and file size is that quality effects the image aesthetics (high or low) in color. File size relates to how much space a file takes.


Quality 100

When making the jpg quality 100, it makes the quality better, even though the quality of jpgs in general are undesired.

File size:  33KB

Quality 60

When changing the jpg quality from 100 to 60, it compresses the image more making the image have less quality.

File size: 33KB


Quality 0

When changing the jpg quality from 60 to 0, you can really see the quality diminish. It has compressed the so much and its clearly visible without even zooming in.


File size: 16KB

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Layers and Compositing

Layering and Compositing

The goal of this assignment is to become familiar with layering and compositing in Photoshop. We were to take photos and make the background transparent and composite the image onto a new document. It was a fun assignment to do because I always wanted to learn how to do make a photo transparent, and now that I have this new skill, I can do multiple things with layering and compositing. In this particular photo, there is no specific story behind it other than learning how to layer and getting used to the setting in Photoshop.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Selection Tools

 Rectangular Marquee Tool

Puts selection into a square.

 Elliptical Marquee Tool

 Puts selection into an oval.

 Lasso Tool

It's a free-draw selection that is good for outlining.

  Polygonal Marquee Tool

Allows you to free draw polygonal shapes.

Magic Wand Tool

It identifies areas of the photo with the same color selected.





 Magnetic Lasso Tool

Attaches to items on a photo to outline.

Semiotics - Logo

 Twitter Logo

  • Logo Description

 This is the Twitter logo which features a single light blue bird.
  • Symbols

 The bird symbol represents the fact that the way to communicate on this platform is to tweet.
  • Origin of symbols

          The origins of this logo date back to 2012 when the company updated the logo to this symbol because at this point, Twitter had become world famous, and when someone were to see this logo, they would instantaneously know it is Twitter. 
  • Logo Meaning

          The meaning of this logo is that when you are tweeting, you are "speaking" as though you are a bird on that medium.
  • Semiotic Category

          Symbolic.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Semiotics

 Semiotics

Semiotics is the science of signs. The three categories of semiotics are iconic, indexical, and symbolic. Iconic means that the image looks like what it represents. Indexical means that the image is causal. Symbolic means that an image is representative of something else.

This symbol of the men's restroom is iconic and symbolic because it is iconic of  a man, and is used to represent the men's restroom. The word in the background is "relations" which can mean there are relations that a human may have externally, and internally. Also the colors chosen for this crayon drawing are masculine which goes in hand with the male sign. I wanted the tough texture in a semi-dark color so that it makes the texture apparent.