&Gracias

Images taken from foto decadent.
Textures & brushes used from gender and JC.
Layout by colbydageek

Today in class we looked at how to create pictures from scratch.

- 8x10, 5x7, 4x6 are the top sizes for prints

gaussian is a random motion
uniform means its the same all the way across

Merge Visible - Takes all the layers you can see and merges them (all the layers without the eye icon beside it is unaffected).

You can use arrow keys to fine tune the placing of your image.

We created a brick wall today from a simple rectangle to an entire brick wall!

Bevel - side

Bert monroy (bertmonroy.com) creates digital paintings completely from scratch on photoshop

Labels: bevel, gaussian, layers, photoshop, pixel, uniform

Oh gosh, I was so tired when I came to class. But still, here is what we learned:

Toolbar:

*All of these have Letter shortcuts so you can type in a letter to automatically go into each toolbar.

Rectangular Marquee Tool - Bottom right corner has an arrow that gives you choices such as Elliptical Marquee Tool(draws circle). Used for selecting. When the marquee is active, it means you can only do things to the selection and nothing outside of it. Ctrl-D turns off the selection. If you want a perfect circle, use the elliptical marquee tool and hold down shift. You can do the same for the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

Move Tool - You use this to move things around or individual objects.

Lasso Tool - Draw a selection line around a certain object to select only what you've seperated. Polygonal Lasso Tool selects in polygon shapes while Magnetic Lasso Tool tries to find the edges for you so it is more accuarate.

* Feather: creates soft border around your selection (also applicable to Rectangular/Elliptical Marquee Tool as well as Lasso)

Magic Wand Tool - Selects colours on your image based on the tolerance level. (e.g. if you enter 10, it will select everything 10 levels similar to the colour you select with your cursor) Useful for selecting entire areas of your images (e.g. someone's eye) Contiguous: touching.

Crop Tool - Used to crop parts of an image. You can customize your cropping even more by inserting the inches/pixel size (width, length), resolution and more.

Type Tool (horizontal or vertical) - Puts words into your image.

Polygon Tool - Puts shapes into your image.

Gradient Tool - Creates a blend between to colours.

Airbrush Tool - Creates an Airbrush effect. Used to draw.

Paintbrush Tool - Creates a paintbrush effect. Used to draw.

Paint Bucket Tool - Fills in an area with your selected colour.

Pencil Tool - Creates a Pencil effect. Used to draw.

Eraser Tool - Erases parts of your image. Background Eraser Tool - erases only the background. Magic Eraser- uses tolerance to erase everything within the amount of tolerance you input.

Impressionist Brush - Same as paint brush except it puts in an impressionist effect. (e.g. makes it appear like you've painted the image)

Blur Tool - Used to make parts of an image blurry.

Sharpen Tool - Increases the contrast between the image (the edges between the different colours). You have to use carefully or it will look unnatural. Best way to use is very lightly.

Sponge Tool - Softens an image, blends the colours. Use this to soften someone's expression.

Smudge Tool - Like sponge tool, except harsher. Blends colours, softens.

Red Eye Brush Tool - Used to get rid of the red eye.

Dodge Tool/Burn Tool - Opposites of each other. Burn subtly darkens an image. Dodge subtly lightens an image. Use for highlights, shadows, etc.

Clone Stamp Tool/Pattern Stamp Tool - Clones the area you choose (Alt+Click). Pattern Stamp - Puts a pattern in.

Eye Dropper Tool - Used to go in the image and select a colour.

Hand Tool - moves things around.

Zoom Tool - Zooms in or out.

Hope this helped!

Goodbye,
- Serena

Labels: photoshop

Some Facts:
- An average person has no use for 24 megapixel camera because a maximum amount of pixels to print is 2 million, even less when on the internet
- megapixels are overrated
- camera phones are not bad because of the small megapixels, but because of the small shutters

Today in class, we worked on making a picture look better.

- Layers help you keep control of your picture, since you can undo and step backward only so many steps (depending on your computer's memory), so layers help you create pieces of information on top of your original image. The great thing about layers is that you can go back and delete them if you are unhappy with the results.

*If you want to view the image without the layer, press the eye button beside!

- Enhance>Brightness/Contrast>Levels - Shows the Hexadecimal values in levels (like a bar graph)

- By sliding the little triangles under the graph, you can change the levels of black, white and grey (black triangle on left, white triangle on right and grey triangle in the middle)

- In movies, directors can film scenes in broad daylight but change the levels to make it appear as if it were the darkest of nights, all part of the movie magic.

- Enhance>Color>Hue/Saturation - Changes the colour levels, saturation (intensity of the colour), and Lightness (how much light hits the picture aka brightness).
* By checking Colorize, it makes your image one complete solid shade of colour.
* Master changes all the colours but you could also select from the drop down menus the different individual colours you can alter.

Ta ta for now!
- Serena

Resolution you typically use for print 300 DPI (dots per inch)

72 DPI (FAST) for computers (internet) (dots per inch)

a million pixels is a megapixel

4 by 6 inches is the most common size for photographs

only time you use a large DPI (e.g. 1200dpi) is for something like scanning a tiny picture and blowing it up later.

a comparison in sizes could be that a 300dpi picture could be as much as 4mb while a 72 dpi could be about 500 kb. A low resolution picture would be even less.

If you retrieve an image from the internet and you want to increase the dpi and the overall quality, something you must know, is that you will never have the same quality as the original image before compression, was. This is because when an image compresses, it loses information as it throws it out in order to lessen the size of the image. The information lost can never be recovered, even when you go back in the compressed photo and try to increase the dpi. It will look better if you increase the dpi but definitely not the same as the original.

A Jpeg is a file format. it is a way to save picture information. Jpeg loses information from the pixels thus earning the name "lossy". It gets rid of unnecessary info. Good because everyone can use.

Lost-less are file names such as .psd which saves every piece of information. (no information is taken away). PSDs are good but not everyone can read this and it is a huge file.

tif. tagged image format. lost-less typically.

bmp: bitmap. lost-less.

Labels: dots per inch, jpeg, photoshop, pixel, psd, resolution

"People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure." - Russell Baker


Wow.. It certainly has been a while and I apologize! I've been busy doing a ton of stuff, of which I shall elaborate further on.

We all know last weekend was quite a treat! Thursday was activity day which meant no school and we got to do fun-filled activities. My activity was Sportsball and a Movie. In the morning we played various sports from Volleyball to Basketball to Badminton and much more. We also got yummy treats like candy, chocolate, chips, and weirdly, apples and apple juice (someone has a thing for apples.. Ms Silva!). Afterward, we proceeded to Fairview Mall, where we watched a comedy film "The Pink Panther 2" starring Steven Martin in the newly opened Silver City. My review on the new Silver city: It blows. First of all, the arcade is much too small and the prices are much too high, especially since the theatres aren't that much of an upgrade from Rainbow Cinemas.

And what did I think of the movie? Well, it was alright. It guaranteed some laughs but beyond that, it did little. However, the day at an overall standpoint was quite enjoyable and relaxing and I was quite content.

The following day was a PA day and the Monday was Family Day! It was awesome and I had a fun time. But regretfully, I had just a bit too much fun and neglected my blog, wiki and podcast. We are still quite behind on our podcasts and I'm not sure what we can do to do better, as we are having some conflict in our group at the moment. However, I am determined, and when Serena's determined, she is as stubborn as a cow.

Now even after returning from school, I've had hardly enough time to do anything, let alone upload podcasts and whatnot. Today, I participated in a math contest called Pascal's test and it was very.. interesting, to say the least. It definitely took some serious thinking and my brain just wanted to go to sleep for a looonng time afterward. But trust, that I will definitely do my best to get the podcasts up to speed :) I'm very sorry for the inconvenience but unfortunately Chronicles of BTT has just about the three most procrastinating people all jumbled together.

So please bear with us.

Going off for a nice lonnnng nap,
- Serena

P.S. GOOD LUCK FOR THE BTT TEST TOMORROWW! (to those who have yet to do it, including moi)

Labels: Blogger, Chronicles of BTT, Life, Podcasts, updates, Wiki

"The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today in class we reviewed the hexadecimal place values.

To write 16 in hexadecimal, it would be 10 because under the 16 place value we put 1 and under the 1 place value we put 0.

I am getting pretty comfortable with the hexadecimal place value and I am completely aware of the binary system. It is pretty simple to grasp once you've fully understood the concept.

New facts that I've learned:
- Always 6 numbers in the hexadecimal code for colour (e.g. #000000), 2 for Red, 2 for Blue, 2 for Green

Labels: Hexadecimal

"You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was." - Irish Proverb

Today in class we learned about colour wheels. CYMK (cyan, yellow, magenta and key ->black)which is what we use for ink (e.g. art class) and RGB (red green blue) is light-focused (e.g. computers).

- There are 256 picture elements (pixels) in each colour
- every pixel has pieces of rgb (red green blue)
- to get "perfect" colour (e.g. perfect blue), enter 255 (because 0 is a level) for blue and 0 for the red and green.
- no levels = black
- all levels = white
- even levels = grey (on a scale of black-looking grey to white-looking grey)
- 16.7 million different colours (shades)
- colours on computer are measured in hexadecimals

He also taught us Hexadecimal place values.

BASE 16

e.g. 1, 16, 256, etcetc

Since you can't write 10 in a single place value, we use letters of the alphabet to represent double digit numbers.

A= 10 B= 11 C= 12 D= 13 E= 14 F= 15
THERE IS NO G or the rest.

How do Hexadecimals relate to colours? Well colours use hexadecimals as their language so you know how a code for a certain colour looks like #3fe33f (e.g. on MSN). Well believe it or not, that is hexadecimals!

See you later,
- Serena

Labels: colour, CYMK, Hexadecimal, pixel, RGB, wheel

"When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken." - Benjamin Disraeli

Today in class, Mr. Case is absent since he is at his baby's operation (GET WELL SOON CHARLOTTE!). We had a subsitute and she basically told us to do what Mr. Case explained to us on Friday (Mail Merge). The instructions were also on the Wiki and you could go to Word Help and search for "Mail Merge" if we needed extra assistance.

Labels: Mail, Merge

Serena
Isabelle.

Shehnila
Neda
Sadia
Peggy
Sanjida
Amna
Joanna
Mohammed
Konstantin
Derick

September 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
February 2009
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009