Graphics Knowledge Exam

Today was the day we wrote our test on "Adobe Photoshop Elements". The test itself was pretty straight forward and I believe if you paid attention in class and did all the work you probably did fine. Even saying that, I'm still nervous about my own mark but that is inevitable. Below are a few things that were either on the test, mentioned in class, or are in some other way significant and related to our work on Photoshop Elements.

Aspects:
-Resolution: This is the pixel to inch ratio, or how many dots per inch are in your image. 300 for print images, 72 for internet purposes
-Canvas Size: This refers to the width and height of your canvas, the most common print size is 4 x 6 (inches).
-Hexadecimal Codes: The values used to represent all of the 16.7 million hues available to work with.

Tools:
-Marquee Tool: Either retangular or elliptical, used for selection.
-Paintbrush: Used to paint directly on to the canvas with varying brush sizes.
-Lasso: Freeform selection tool.
-Dodge/Burn: Used to darken or lighten an image, name comes from actual chemical processes that were used in the past.
-Sharpen/Blur: Used to blur or sharpen an image.
-Crop: Cut or clip your image to the desired part and discard the rest of the image.
-Gradient: Used to spread from the background colour to the foreground colour. (Acheives a faded effect with one colour blending into the next.)
-Smudge: Does exactly what it's called, smudges.
-Eraser: Again, no brainer, erases.
-Clone Stamp: Clones from a source. Takes one part of an image and duplicates to another part of the image.
-Horizontal/Vertical Type Tool: Adds text either flowing horizontally or vertically to the image.
-Eyedropper: Selects a colour in the image and sets it to the foreground colour. Handy when identifying or narrowing down colours in an image.
-Magic Wand: Used to select parts of a picture, determined by the hexadecimal code fo a colour and controlled by the tolerance setting.

Palettes:
-Layers: Displays all your layers, their visibility and all the effects that have been applied to them.
-Navigator: Shows you an overview of your picture, the percentage your viewing it at and allows you to move around the image.
-History: Records and shows you previous actions that have been taken.
-Layer Styles: Lists and allows you to apply the different layer styles available.
-Swatches: Shows you different basic colours you can use.
-File Browser: Allows you to navigate through your files and open them.

Touch the Internet

So, go ahead? Touch the internet. What? You don't think you can?

Most people do not consider the internet as an actual physical part of our world but the truth is it's just as physical as the hands I'm using to type up this entry. The first step to understanding this concept is not confusing your browser with the internet. The internet is a lot of computers connected together in various ways. Your browser is a program like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox that you can use to browse the internet.

There are many purposes for the internet, more than just the everyday websites you visit. These include things like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and more. The most common use however for the internet is made possible by hyper text which is used in operating the world wide web. Hyper text is text that allows us to link data to other data. Without hyper text nothing else on the world wide web could exist. Hyper text explains the use of the "HTTP" at the beginning of web addresses. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

That's how hyper text works but creating web pages and creating hyper text is done through using HTML. HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a code that is made up of a series of tags that allows us to create, alter and tweak web pages to our liking. Knowledge of HTML is key to creating your own website or publishing your work onto the internet. The thing to remember out HTML is that it is just long lines of text and nothing more until it is translated and displayed properly.

In the past everything had to be done using HTML and typing up long series of tags to complete a webpage but today we have much better tools. An example of our development is the graphical interface we have now instead of just a text-based one before. Our browser translates HTML and displays what the tags are basically commanding the computer to take action as.

Now we have programs that have made creating the actual content easier, just like we've made viewing it much more enjoyable. One of these programs is Adobe Dreamweaver, which automatically creates code for any action you take on a certain area on the screen. Or you can directly create code and the box will display what your code is actually going to look like on a browser. Dreamweaver is the most popular program for creating websites and doing HTML related work.

We'll be using Dreamweaver for the next couple of days to create a website of our own. We can use this website to put up our Portfolios for the end of the year, but more about that later.

Creative Manipulation...or so they say...

Predictably, we've been given another assignment to work on. This time we're using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate a picture 'creatively'. The pictures we've been given to work with are of teachers we know. Now it' s up to us and our limitless creativity. Of course our creativity is to our liking...which means we've just been handed the faces of our teachers wtih the ability and the order to do whatever we want!

Well...perhaps I've made this sound more like a maniacal plan than an assignment but I can guarantee that those thoughts went through the heads of many of my classmates. We've been asked to be respectful and I suppose that's what we'll do, but it doesn't meen we can't have a little bit of fun.

There are three rules we are to follow when manipulating teachers' photos:

1) Permission: We must receive permission to perform any manipulations to other people's photos.

2) Know the line of respect: If we are given permission we should know to respect that, and remember to keep our limits.

3) All work must be in Class, and stay there: The images are not to be taken out of our BTT classes, because someone else may not understand our intentions.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do as of yet, but there are so many possibilites that I may not limit myself to just one picture. Whether it be comical, disturbing or a piece of art that will change the world...I can't wait to see my final result and those of others as well!

And like that, it's gone!

Today is the last day of March Break! Of course we all wish that the break would last a bit longer than it has, but the end was inevitable anyway. I don't have much to talk about that would be curriculum related but my March Break was quite enjoyable. I'll just mention some of the technology-related discoveries and parts of my March Break.

I experimented with a few things in Adobe Photoshop over the break. I focussed on one specific tool to create different images. During the break, I also realized that studying Adobe Photoshop is beneficial even if you don't plan to use it often. Being familiar with the tools in Adobe Photoshop can really help you understand tools and operations in other programs as well.

Other than that I have taken a sudden and most probably a short lived interest in pocket PC's. A Pocket PC is basically like a smaller computer, small enough to fit in your hand to be exact. Pocket PC's are continuously being improved and they can do many things that a normal Desktop PC could do. They also can be used as mobile phones in some cases. The functions of a Pocket PC, I have found, are very similar to those of a BlackBerry. However, the Pocket PC is a trademark of Microsoft and the BlackBerry was developped by a Canadian company known as RIM (Research In Motion). They are both classified as a PDA(Personal Digital Assistant). The new iPhone also uses similar technology.

Close to last, another part of my vacation that involved technology was expanding my knowledge of file extensions. I have listed this close to last as it gave me the most trouble! I had to ask around and even do a little bit of research myself to find out what file formats some files were in. Eventually I realized what they could all do and what program would be used to run them all, but it wasn't easy. It was also quite frustrating since I wasn't feeling very patient when I experienced this problem. At least it worked out in the end.

Now lastly, this is about the dangers of not saving your work, or backing up your files! I learned this the hard way a long with the other members of my family as the main computer had to be restored and we thought we had lost all of the files on there. Luckily, they were able to be recovered with a little help from some friendly technicians. This taught me to make sure I have backed up important files somewhere other than the hard drive but also to save frequently!

Well it seems like I've covered a lot of my vacation in this post, just goes to show what a big part technology is of our world!

First addition: Image Galleries

After a lot of work, and time in front of a my "Workspace" I'm happy to say that I'm finally finished with my ."..From scratch" assignment for Photoshop. Although it's not perfect, I think I learned a lot from the assignment. The purpose of the whole thing was to apply problem solving skills to Photoshop and I think I came across quite a few of those.

For starters, the Ferris wheel consisted of many lines. To keep things simple, and organized I used the duplicate, merge and group features in Photoshop. This taught me how an organized workspace can really be helpful.

The background clouds weren't supposed to look as I planned them to be. But after playing with the filters, burn and dodge and gradient tools, the clouds turned out looking as they do. Actually my picture was going to have a digital camera on the side instead of the balloons, but because of the change in the angle/perspective I thought it wouldn't be realistic to have a camera there. So the balloons were a final addition to my image.

Drawing the balloons took thought too, even though it doesn't seem like much I had to make sure to draw them leading to the Ferris wheel to keep it as the main focus of the work.

The final product can be found at the Wiki, where we have the opportunity to create our own File Galleries and upload images we create.

Here's just a thumbnail of what it looks like:



That's all for now
--Amna