In today's Media Studies lesson we were working on our photoshop skills. The lesson consisted of us watching videos about Photoshop and following the instructions the video was presenting to us and using them on a particular image on Photoshop (adjusting the lighting of a picture, changing the effects on a picture etc). The purpose of these videos was to help us develop our photoshop skills so we could then use these skills throughout the course.
I had to complete tasks 1-7 and along with each task there would be a an image and a video, as the tasks went on the more skills you developed from the videos (task 1 was a basic skill) whereas in task 7 I had to follow many different steps to get the image that I wanted.
Before starting the tasks, we completed a practise task and I had to fill a plain image with colour. I had to fill a tennis ball green and fill a beach in. This was a basic skill on Photoshop and I did this using the 'fill' bucket tool. There was one problem when doing this, which was that when filling the beach, the spade hadn't been drawn to the end, which meant every time I tried to fill it, it wouldn't. I overcame this problem by using the drawing tool and filling up the gap in this spade, I was then able to fill the spade any colour.
Once I had completed the practise task, I could now move on to starting the actual task. In task one I had to follow the steps in the video and change the lighting of an image. I did this by enhancing photographic exposure. To do this I had to add a curves adjustment layer and lighten the darker side of the image. After I had completed this, I had to lighten the girls face on the 'snow girl' image. I done this by adding a layer and lightening the whole image, then reduced the layer capacity to 50% and inverted layer mask. To finish the image by lightning the girls face I had to use a round brush with white as the colour and fill in her her face. Following the instructions of the video I also changed an image from colour to black and white and made an image brighter.
The next task was a retouching and repair task. To do this, I added a new layer to draw on and used the clone source palet to let us define multiple sources with the healing brush to repair an old image and heal the child's arms and face. I then moved on to the bag task. I had to make a bag stand out against it's background. This was the 'making and refining sections' task. I used the 'Quick Selection Tool' and pressing the 'W' key and I clicked and dragged around the bag, to make sure I selected the whole image I had to zoom in and also select that area of the bag. Then I had to hold down the 'alt' key and click into an area I didn't want selected (the background). This made me possible to change the background and lighting of the bag to see which background the bag looked best against.
After this, I had to do the 'applying filters' task. This allowed me to complete multiple filters to the image which you can change and make the image stand out against the filter in the background. The final task I had to complete was on a bunch of roses. I had to make the image black and white but use a brush to fill in the flowers and make these the only colour part of the image by making these red again and keeping the rest of the image black and white.
I found today's lesson very useful as I will be able to recap on these skills throughout the course and apply them to any images I have to create.
