CMP1014 Creative Technologies 2006

Photoshop 7.0
Wikipedia
Workshops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view.php/3455

Two swans

Keywords: Swans, Swan, White Swan Beak, Neck Feathers, Water, Blue, House, House Reflection, River, Wings, Tail
Category:- Animals/Birds
Submission:- 14th November 2006
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Three swans sunset

Keywords: Swan, Water, Sunset, Feathers, White, Three Swans, Beaks, Long necks, Swimming, Still, Ripples
Category:- Animals/Birds
Submission:- 14th November 2006
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Boat/Tree/Reflection

Keywords: Trees, River, Water, White Boat, Boat, Reflection, Blue sky, Sunny, Park, Transport, Nature, Blue, Grass, Docked, Still
Category:- Nature/Trees
Submission:- 14th November 2006
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Sunset/Trees/Reflection

Keywords:-Trees, Sunset, Blue sky, Water, River, Grass, Reflection, Daylight, Bush, Tree reflection, Green, Still
Category:- Nature/Trees
Submission:- 14th November 2006
Feedback:-

Now the aesthetic, i am going to describe each picture i took and relate it to the focal point, balance, the rule of thirds, isolation, pattern and textures etc.

Picture 1 - The two swans picture.

Focal point:- Two swans
Balance:- Balanced in the middle, bewteen the top and bottom and the sides.
Rule of thirds:- Focused in the middle part

Picture 2 - Three swans and the sunset.

Focal point:- Three swans and the sunset reflection
Balance:- Swans spaced out
Rule of thirds:- The swans on the right slightly up, and the two botom swans on the lower boxes.

Picture 3 - The boat and the tree/reflections.

Focal point:- The boat, trees and reflection.
Balance:- Picture in four sections, the blue sky, the boat, trees and the reflection, equally spaced out.
Rule of thirds:- In the 3 by 3 grid, the bottom on the insecting botton left lines, the tree on the top left insecting lines and the river on the right botton insecting lines.

Picture 4 - The tree with the sunset and relfection in the water.

Focal point:- The tree in the middle of the pcture and its reflection.
Balance:-Tree on the top part and the reflection on the botton part in middle of picture.
Rule of thirds:- The tree and the reflection in the middle.

Ok, i am going to explain the processes of the editing thase and why i have edited in a certain way. I have edited the photos in photoshop, and these are how the pictures came out:-

The picture of the boat and the tree/reflections

The first picture that I edited was the photo of the boat in the bottom left hand corner, with the tree and the blue sky in the background, and also the reflection of the tree in the river. The first thing that I did to the picture was to crop it, not an awful lot, just the sides that really wasn’t needed, and therefore was a waste of space. As I said before I decided to place the boat in the corner to make way for the trees and the rivers reflection. Now the boat is in the very most bottom corner because of the cropping and the pixel dimension is 1680x1358, and as you can see its way within the limit that is required to upload to the website.
To make the boat and the trees more f the focal point I decided to blur the leaves hanging in the to left hand corner, allowing the eyes of the viewer to be drawn in on the rest of the image. Therefore you have got the blue sky in the top left, which adds brightness to the picture naturally, the trees in the top left and reflection on the bottom right.
I didn’t want to make the boat look much better by using the repair tool, or the clone tool because I would think it would then lose some of the character of the boat. However I did touch up the boat a little bit. Next I decided to make the picture slightly brighter, and did this by increasing the brightness function a little, actually by only 1. Then I adjusted the levels of the image again not by much because there was a lot of light in the image. I thought in order for the picture to sell, or to improve the picture I increased the saturation by +9, to make to colours stand out more.
Lastly I then decided to sharpen the image, and adjusted the image to 77%, radius 4.1 and the threshold on 27; this then made the image slightly sharper, but not too much.

The photo with the two swans

The next image that I edited next in the picture of the two swans with one that is creeping in the image. Again like the last image I cropped out the third swan, and made the image slightly smaller to allow the focal point of the image (the two swans) to be seen more easily. I didn’t want to crop too much of the picture, this is because I wanted the reflection of the houses in the water to be shown and the pixels of the image would be too low, as when cropped the pixel dimension is 1498x1330, but again within the limit that is required. Due to the fact that I cropped the image and that I took the image of the swans when they were moving, made the image not so sharp. I decided to then sharpen of the image, as you should be able to see in the image. Again using the unsharpen mask tool in Photoshop. I didn’t do too much as the image would then start to look like blocks, which would then ruin the photo completely.
As when I took the picture of the swans, it was on its way to sunset, so I changed the white balanced to sunset; however the image still came out to being a little blue, which is no good as I want the swans to look white. I therefore changed the colour balance in the image options so that there was more red, but also less blue, which then took the blue slightly out of the picture, therefore made the swans feathers white. You will notice this clearly when comparing the two pictures.
As it was more towards sunset the picture looked slightly dark, therefore changing the levels and the contrast of the picture made the picture appear a lot lighter, and then straight after breathed some life into the colours by increasing the saturation of the colours, again you can see a big difference, for example the house reflection in the water. I didn’t want to use the clone tool to get rid of the grass in the water because it will remove the character of the piece, the whole reason the swans heads are in the water is because they are feeding and eating the grass, which is why I decided to leave to grass in the water.

The photo with the sunset with trees and the reflection

Next I edited the picture of the tree and the sunset. The original picture looked a lot darker then this, which made the picture look dull. To fix this I first before anything, adjusted the levels of the picture, making the middle part of the image look a lot bright and by also adjusting the saturation so the greens looked a bit brighter and therefore stood out a lot more Now in order for the main focal point of the image to stand out (the tree and the reflection) I decided to then blur the bushes creeping in on the left hand side o the image, to draw the viewers attention away from this to the middle of the image.
Next I cropped. I couldn’t completely crop the bushes out completely for which then the focal point, the tree would be cut into, which is one reason why I blurred the bush on the left, as I said to draw away the attention. The sides and the bottom I cropped as again this was not needed and I wanted the main part of the image t be clearly identified and stand out.
The image therefore came to 2271x1881 pixels. The I decided to sharpen the trees slightly, not an awful lot, actually by only 5% which is very low,

The sunset reflection with the three swans

Now I particularly like this picture. I feel like I captures the sunset through the water, with the colours and also the swans themselves. As the swans were nicely spaced out, the one on the right, two at the bottom, and the reflection of the bushes and the sunset towards the top. Therefore I feel that composition of the mage is well placed. Some people may think there not really a focal point, but I feel I captured the natural instincts of the swans going about their normal business, but its really portrays the peacefulness of nature.
Now as I was saying as it’s spaced out, I didn’t need to crop much of the picture at all, mainly the bottom and bit of the sides, now making the pixels 2334x1604. Again because it was at sunset I felt the image was slightly to dark, for which I then boosted the levels to make it much lighter, gave the colours a slight boost, not awfully much, but a tad.
Next I made the whole image sharper, this can mainly be seen o the ripples of the water, for which it reflects some of the light, mainly the top part of the image, I felt any further and it would be too much. Lastly I made use of the clone tool. The bit of wood in the water at the bottom and little black parts I got rid of by using this tool, to make the image better to look and also clearer.

I need to confess something. When I edited the images I made them into JPEG files and did the compression on 90% to get a smaller file for which I will explained. However forgot to also save them as Photoshop files as I didn’t realise until after. Therefore I edited the images again to make them look very similar to the ones I submitted on Bigstockphoto.com and the ones that I put In the folder of post-production of the CD, which the information based in this blog is of the ones I reedited, but are very similar to the original.

All the files that i have saved as JPEG are on 90% quality to compress the files down to a much smaller size. This means that whe uploading them to the website and to any other websites they will be able to load in about 10 seconds, as this is the average time a person waits. This is based on a person having half a meg line, broadband. If i was to use these files for professional se then i would save them at the highest quality, and not worry about the file size. The sizes varie between 512Kb and 1.5Mb. Therefore not that large of an image for an website.

File formats:-

JPEG (.jpg) Advantages: Supports 8-bit colour -red/green/blue therefore a total of 24 bits. Due to being able to compression, able to reach small compressed files. Supported by many programs etc such as PDF files, the internet - widely used.
Disadvantages: More the more compressed the file the more quality is taken out of the picture. Suffers from generatinal degradation when repeatedly edited an saved over and over again (lossy).

Gif ( ) Advantages: Supports animation.
Disadvantages: 8 bit colour palette (256 colours). Only good for simple pictures/diagrams due to basic colours. lossless, in which does not suffer from degradation from repeatedly edited and saved.

Tiff ( ) Advantages: 16-bit colour/ 48 bit in total. Can be lossless compression. Good compression.
Disadvantages: Can be lossy compression. Not widely used internet browsers.

PNG ( ) Advantages: True colour - 16 million colours. Good for areas of large unifrom colour, lossless format, good for editing.
Disadvantages: Many old browsers do not support this format.

Photoshop ( ) Advantages: Holds extra data about the image, thats from photoshop programs. Can compress files.
DisadvantagesPixel dimension:-

Sunset/trees/reflection photo:- 2592x1944
Boat/trees/reflection photo:- 2048x1536
Two swans/house reflecion photo:- 2048x1536
Three swans sunset photo:- 2592x1944

As you can see, all the pictures are within the limit of the pixel dimenson of the assignment and also the limit of the bigstockphoto website. The higher the pixels the better the picture can be. so the 2592x1944 is better then the 2048x1536. This means that i am able to crop the larger pixel pictures more as they wil not become as blurred, because the resolution is better, resolution being that the higher the mega pixels the more then image can be enlarged with becoming distorted. Therefore the higher the pixel levels the better.

Potential print size:-

(Pixels divided by DPI)
(pixels and DPI based on large JPEG on Bigstockphoto.com

Sunset/trees/reflection photo:- (2271 x 1881 @ 300dpi) = 14239.17
Boat/trees/reflection photo:- (1680 x 1358 @ 300dpi) = 7604.8
Two swans/house reflecion photo:- (1498 x 1330 @ 300dpi)= 6641.13
Three swans sunset photo:- (2334 x 1604 @ 300dpi) = 12479.12

Ok i have taken many pictures and narrowed it down from eight good pictures to the best four of my opinion. The eight pictures are in my media sectio under the album (8 possible pictures). I have chosen the following pictures:-

The sunset with trees and reflection of the trees in the river.

The sunset picture of the three swans.

The two swans and half a one.

The picture of a boat in the corner, with trees and the reflection in the river.

These are the pictures that i have chosen. The location of the pictures are away from the city as you can see, and down the brayford river. There was many boats down the river docked, which inspired my picture of the boat shot.

The shot of the boat with the reflection of the trees in the background, i thought was a good shot. This is because i didn't want the focal point of the image to be in the centre so i shifted the boat to the bottom left of the shop, to make way for the trees in the backgound and that the reflection of the trees in the river. Most of the shots are of the still water. We noticed that as we went further away from the town, the water became stiller and therefore the reflections of the trees came out much better then i thought. This therefore portryas the image i was aiming to get, its a peaceful picture because the river is clam, also that the boat is docked and not moving. Also because of the trees in the background empthasises this. I took the shot on the setting white balance - daylight, high quality.

The shot of the three swans with the sunset in the reflection of the water. This shot i also liked as the swans are nicely layed out, not all in the middle. Originally the swans were in a line again nicely spread out, but i couldn't get the camera in position intime to take the shot, so i waited untill they were spaced out a little bit. This also meant that there would have to be less cropping of the image for which doing this could potentially destroy the image, making it blurry. The reflection of the suset is what i think completes the image. The yellows, oranges etc reflection on the surface of the water with the swans swimming slowly adds to the character of the image. And as the swans were swimming slowly it meant that the ripples were less, but just enough to add some action to the shot, for which the suns light could reflect off, as you can see more in the top right hand side of the shot. However the only problem of this shot is that its abit dark, but can be fixed and make the image clearer in the post-production stage. I took this shot on the settings, white balance - sunset, high quality, and on sport mode because the swans were moving and this type on shots the swans were moving.

The shot of the two swans with another swan trying to enter the shot is picture that many of my friends thought was the best. i waited untill the two swans were about to pass each other so they are close togehter, abit a bit of luck in which the nearest swan opened its wings slightly, and that both head there necks bent and down at the same time eating the grass that you can see in the bottom part of the shot. I also allowed space for the reflection of the houses in the background, which again due to the clamness of the ripples turned out very well. I thought this shot followed the theme of nature, and that it followed my aim in creating images of peace, relaxation, which realy appeals and shines out in this image. I would do a few things such as make the swans look abit whiter and crop the image so the swan on the right is no longer there. then i feel the image would become much better t look at, and more of a chance in getting submitted. Again i had this on the sports mode, with the settings on daylight as the white balance and again on good quality.

The last picture of the trees hanging over, again with the current theme of the reflections i the water, but i waited till sunset, so the colours in the sky would lift the picture, make it more appealing to look at, and i think it has worked because if you look at one o the other shots i have taken, which is identical but during the day, doesn't look as good as this picture. Which is why i waited untill sunset to take the picture.The fact that the tree takes up a large portion of the shot, is the main focal point, which is what i am to do, but i need to touch it up a little bit, such that as the bush on the eft part of the shot, will become blurred so that the time i the middle stads outmore, and to make the picture alot lighter in the middle of the shot, so that it looks alot brighter and therefore sel and attract more poeple to look and possibly buy on the website that i will upoad to. The settings for this picture is sunset for the white balance, exposed the shot a little longer.

My group consists of me, Brett and Chris. We have decided on the theme nature, which includes things like trees, animals, plants etc. We have chosen this theme because there is plenty of this around the area, (working with what we have got)also that we have looked into the bigstockphoto website and many pictures are of this theme and many have been sld. So there is clearly a markek for this. Lastly we choose this them because it is of a peaceful and calm theme for which many people enjoy.

Therefore my aim of the project is to take picutres of nature, such as trees, animals (possibly swans, as there are many of them), to make them unique in some way, so for example pictures of the animals and trees in the sunset, which would add to the peace and calmness of the pictures.