Final Evaluation

Hello,

As of today, 2010, November 22th, my image, a magnificent work of art (I kid, I kid) was completed. The last step in this project is my final evaluation, which in itself to now is frankly, quite a daunting task. Up until this point in this project, there had always been a hidden set of rails, guidelines that I follow, guiding me along this project. With the introduction of the evaluation, all above mentioned flew out of the window, leaving me puzzled and bamboozled.

Its due within a week, which throws more daunting activities out of the window, such as video recording, yet another Photoshop file. A more tricky aspect of this evaluation is no massive chunks of text on a word document, which blocks out many options, such as documents or even power-points. All this leaves is another image, with for some strange and mysterious reason I'm not too enthusiastic about, or a video recording, which in my eyes would be perfect, although slightly out of the window with the time frame that I have. I'll be thinking on this and hopefully I would've come up with a solution.

The End is Near!

Well, our journey has come to its natural end. My second last blog, I've come a long way from being a photoshop newbie, to a reasonably skilled veteran. I feel at ease, a lot more confident with this piece of software than 4 weeks ago...without anymore long-winded dramatic speeches from me, onto my progress.

I finally finished my band poster and a quick google search netted me :http://superuser.com/questions/13724/what-background-image-size-do-you-need-for-the-iphone-ipod-touch , giving me a reasonably good chance of throwing this project down by the end of the lesson. For the remainder of this lesson, I'll be attempting to improve my images, wrap up everything else that I started on (including this blog), my mood boards, and yup.

Until my final blog...stay tuned.

G-man (Hanley)

Use of Images and their Licenses, and Various Other Sources

Site used http://www.stockvault.net/search?query=smoke Another site, with copyright free license

Smoke image, for text effect:http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1063678 License: http://www.sxc.hu/txt/license.html

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1289121 (same site)

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1111544

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1270837

Tutorials Used:http://www.ehow.com/how_2113527_adjust-opacity-adobe-photoshop.html

http://psdfan.com/tutorials/text-effects/create-smokey-typography-in-12-steps/

Yet Another Day....

Today we continued our work, our journey, blah blah blah. Also, I'll be using this as a kind of Memo to keep track of my use of images and their license, which would be added in a separate section below...or alternatively I'll make a blog post keeping track of my usage of images. After a lot of hard work, I finally managed to finish an effect that I saw on a site. The results were surprisingly good, and I feel a lot more confident with Photoshop now, and specifically how it works, and its layering system and how to take advantage of that. I'll be trying to incorporate this into my band project, both by making a similar effect, and taking what I've learned and apply it to my problems and project.

Until Next Week

Hanley

The Journey: Somewhat near the end now!

Today we continued to edit our photo, our primary goal in mind: to become rich and famous. Using this link (http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/50-great-photoshop-text-effect-tutorials-part-ii/), I generally just messed around, trying out new effects, seeing which one would fit my idea of an image the best. Thinking about it, I thought of good images that I want my band to show: youth, power, freedom, streets, which I would try and accommodate into a poster.

I also experienced a minor setback today, when I realized that my image was at an inappropriate resolution. Luckily though, having already gone through this process once it was a cakewalk, taking me about 3 minutes and 37 seconds in total, definitely mores smooth than scrambling about this randomly before. In a way, I was glad this has happened; better now when I didn't make a start than 5 hours into the project.

I like to think of my knowledge of photoshop like an imcompleted quilt: perfect in some aspects, patchy in others where even the simplest task, such as resizing a image requires me to find a tutorial.

http://www.myinkblog.com/2008/07/11/create-a-spectacular-graffiti-effect/ is what I'm currently attempting to create, since it fits well with the above ideas and also learning to do something like this would be useful for future projects.

On the Road to Fame and Glory

Today, we finally finished cutting out the layer. Surprisingly, after figuring out the correct method, it took less than 5 minutes to finish the majority of the image, compared to the pitiful portion than I managed to clean up 'manually' with the eraser tool. In this case, knowledge isn't only half the battle, rather more like 9/10 of it.

Afterwards, the lesson was mostly spent listening to Mr Dickson, our wise mentor talk about the finer points of the usage of photoshop and also on different image types, and also warned us on losing quality, which was a new aspect to me. We had a brief change of name, and for the moment, we had no set task, rather, instead we are to mess around on photoshop, invoking and trying out our ideas. Overall its a very enjoyable process and I can forsee a lot of fun ahead down the road.

The First Day

Band Name: 5 and 1/2 men (can be changed)

Band Members: Hanley Ng, Jim Heaton, Jason Chan, Ryan Wong, Barton Leung

Rappers: G-Man, G.Y.M, J-Zone, RY-N, T-Bone

Today we gathered together, assembled our group and started brainstorming for ideas. We decided on a rapper band style, as this is the image we are most familiar with. More to talk about in the next blog post, when we've made sufficient progress to our road to fame and glory!

Edit: Changed Name from Sweet Wrappers (gives wrong image, can be perceived as 'girly') Added Barton Leung, and 'T-Bone' to list of band members.