Reflection

Movie Poster

Modulated Meaning

Brainstorming

Improving skill

Final

I'd say that my biggest accomplishment in my midterm was the fact that I made most of the depressing and negative pictures appear positive and uplifting when first looking at my visual. I did this by changing the colors, brightness, contrast, and and saturation. Before I started some of the pictures were black and white so I put a gradient overlay on them and changed the colors. Once I changed the colors I wanted to make them brighter so I used the brightness tool and was able to make them more vibrant. For one of the pictures I also used the color overlay tool. I picked a bright pink color and turned down the opacity so you could see through to the picture. I liked that I could make the dreary pictures appear colorful and happy. When someone is first looking at my midterm I was hoping they would see the bright colors and not necessarily notice the sad pictures. However once people continue to look at it I obviously hope they would pick up on the theme of most of the pictures.

I think my most challenging learning experience in Photoshop was the clone stamp tool. For example in one of the quizzes I thought I did a decent job on using this tool to take the star tattoos off of the girl's face. The only problem was that in some areas her face did seem photoshopped. It was very difficult to make her face not appear plastic and fake. I had a hard time also with this tool in this quiz because sometimes the parts I wanted to clone were a different color than the area where I wanted to place it down. However when I completed the next quiz, which was making the movie posters I feel that I improved with the clone stamp tool. For this quiz I mostly used this tool to add in the new actors names and change the title of the movie. This was very time consuming but I felt that the final products letters looked very realistic. For example Blake Lively's name seems like it belongs in the poster, along with the word Sisterhood. I was able to do this by individually clone stamping the other letters in the poster and pasting them down. Before I pasted them down I had to use the same tool and erase/ mask the original actors names. The one part that was very difficult for this poster was when I needed to use letters for the new title but they weren't there. So I had to take the same font from online and paste it in. Overall I think I truly improved with using the clone stamp tool.

In my brainstorming for the midterm I pretty much got a bunch of pictures together about the emotions I was feeling at the time. It was very cluttered and it overwhelmed the viewer because it may not have made too much sense. I knew it was a good start to the midterm project but I knew it did not have too much deep meaning in it. I really liked where I went with the modulated meaning project because not only did I make it more personal but I also felt it was more meaningful. For example I think the fact that I changed the colors of the pictures to make them brighter showed that there was more to just the one emotion I was trying to portray. The pictures had more meaning behind them now that I added my own touch. The modulated meaning also was more organized and better put together than the brainstorming because I added text. The text is a way to try and allow the audience to guess what emotions I'm trying to show in my visual. In the modulated meaning I kept a majority of the brainstorming pictures but I narrowed them down.