This assignment pairs with the font poem as it utilizes images in form of a collage to convey the meaning of the saying in the font poem. I began this assignment by simply looking up images that could represent the words of my font poem. To do this, I used the website, morguefile.com, which has a free archive of useful images. It is important to keep in mind where you get any sort of images, video, or audio to use for a personal project because the issue of copyright laws come into play. One can only use copyright media without permission if the subject is used for educational purposes only.
Once I found some images, I decided that I wanted to choose a landscape image as the background to my collage and then add other images to the scene. I put the background image in and manipulated the hue of the image so it appeared to be more sepia. Then I began to separately open each image that I had saved and began to crop. This part of the assignment was the most tedious because in order for the images to look good in the collage, it is important that they are well cropped. For all of my images, I found it worked best to use the magnetic lasso tool to crop out the subject of the image. Before I cropped some of the images, the flower and light bulbs in particular, I found it worked best to background erase as much as I could before i cropped so that any other lines in the background did not attract the magnetic lasso. The cropping was a slow process because I had to move very carefully around the image to make sure the lasso tool framed the image in the way I wanted it to.
Once I cropped an image, I would select the image and drag it to m collage background tab. Once I held the image there, the new tab would open up and the cropped image would appear. In order to get the copped image to be the size I desired, I used the free transform tool. When re-sizing the image, I held down the shift key so that the image did not get distorted.
When inserting the face of the crying boy, I had to smooth out the edges of the crop so that his face faded into the picture. In order to do this, I used the magic erase tool to fade out the edges of his head and shoulders. I also changed the boy’s hue/saturation and exposure so that he appears almost translucent in the sky.
I cropped and rectangle of notebook writing to fade over the sky part of the background. I also used the magic erase tool here to take out the hard edges of the crop. I inserted the pen to make it look as if it is on the ground but writing the script in the sky. I put a smart filter on the image of the pen and used the blur gallery. I also manipulated the brightness of the pen so that the bottom part looks like it is glowing on the pavement.
The light bulb image is supposed to symbolize ideas coming from words. This is why I have the light bulbs hanging from the sky as if they are the raindrops. I changed the opacity of the light bulbs so that they fade into the image. I also utilized an outer glow. The flower which was originally very bright, I put a color filter on so that it matched better with the background.
The image collage was a struggle at times. But, it really helped me feel more comfortable with Photoshop and allowed me to be creative. I found that if you have a vision, anything can be done in Photoshop, you just need to work with the tools to figure out what the best way to carry out the idea.
Digital Communications 