EN: Festival Poster And Reflective Questions

Festival Poster And Reflective Questions

2. Reflect on your use of Photoshop.  How does it enable creativity?  What were the challenges?  How did you overcome them?

I found Photoshop was a great tool for enhancing any creative ideas I had when creating print work. This was because it had so many easy to use tools which allowed me to drastically alter existing art and photos to what I wanted to use them for. A great example of this is the name logo’s for the bands I wanted to use on my festival poster, as although they were used in original album artwork I could use the magic wand tool to isolate the text I wanted and could utilize the rubber tool to then make it crisp and clear.

However I felt there were a few problems that I had to overcome when dealing with Photoshop such as the layering system which at sometimes was confusing as I would realise I have layered several images onto one layer. I overcome this problem by importing images instead from open projects. Another challenge was the cropping images neatly with no excess remains of the background. Although the magic wand was a great tool it often left elements of the background especially if the contrast of colour was unclear. However I over came this by zooming in more to get a more precise cut of the image and by using the rubber tool to clean up any unwanted bits. 
 

3. List the techniques used in Photoshop.  To what effect?

There were many techniques in Photoshop that I have began to experiment with and use, they include:

• The rubber tool in which you could erase any parts of an image
• Brush tool, which could be used to free hand draw onto your work
• Using the eye drop tool to select any colour of your project to be used by other tools
• The Bucket tool filled in areas with a different colour
• The move tool is the main tool in Photoshop and is great for selecting images and layers to move and adjust the in size and rotation
• Magic Wand tool which is used to select a certain part of an image to isolate it or remove it
• To add text onto of your project use the text button which creates a adjustable text box layer
• The blur tool allows you to blur, sharpen and smudge an image using its sub categories located in the top left of the control bar
• Finally the sponge tool has two main selectable sub-categories burn and dodge tool. Burn helps create adjust the image to make it darker from its original colour while dodge does the opposite, making the original colour lighter

Although I found all of the techniques useful I found that the most helpful were that of the rubber, move and magic wand as this allowed me to import and move images clearly.

4. Evaluate your finished product in terms of the brief.  How successful were you?

I feel that I was successful in creating a visually engaging festival poster that would attract people to stop and look and take notice. This was because I tried to make the text clear cut and easy to read, while still creating a visually enticing images. I believed I managed to achieve this although I would of liked the sub titles to stand out more as the days could be confused as bands at first glance. 

5. Moving on to print production for the digipak and advert.  What advice would you give yourself?

Moving onto making the digipak and advert I would give myself a few pointers of advice. The first would be to try and not clutter up the page aesthetically as it can often be confusing and detrimental to the final product. Secondly I would suggest not using an over complex background because then by adding text it can become unclear and messy, and the message you want to convey will become lost. Finally I would say to myself to make the most important themes of the advert to really stand out, using techniques such as sharpening, text effects and placement.