For this project, I came to understand the importance of compression, whether it’s lossy or not, and to know when is the best time to use each for specific jobs. Especially, in this case, the lossiest compression was the only way I could reduce the file size of some of these images.

I found it easy to practice level and curve adjustment when it came to touching up these photos. It was interesting to see the photos change drastically, and shift in tone and presence as if they weren’t taken from a camera after all.

The most challenging part of this project was its longevity. There weren’t too many times that I found myself completely disinterested in the process, but I found that it was getting repetitive when I had to crop every image the same way when all I really could’ve done is use a batch function or separate UI to crop multiple images at once. I don’t know if that’s possible without letting my computer catch on fire, though it’s certainly not a bad idea.

My submission could be improved by finding a better variety of images. Plain and simple.

I can’t be confident whether it would help, but instead of moving images to InDesign, each image could be placed onto a new artboard in Photoshop and be converted into a page each through its export function.

When it comes down to creating future portfolios, I will consider using this kind of formatting again. I don’t plan on doing it any time soon, but I might not know until I need it.

With this project, I learned how to control the opacity of a layer and its various elements and position it so that it can be layered on top of the layer that I’m working on if the image turns out to be as simplistic as this. Most of the time, I work by positioning the original image under the layer I’m working on, but that honestly seems more problematic in this case.

I found it easy to use the stroke thicknesses to create different roads using different thicknesses of strokes, and different line styles.

The most difficult part of this project was designing the icons for the legend and the map itself since clicking on multiple objects and buttons was the only way I could remember how to operate the Live Paint tool.

I’m actually not certain of how my assignment could be improved. Perhaps if I chose a smaller or larger target image from Google Maps, I could’ve had a more accurate map or a more detailed one, respectively.

I think the assignment could be improved by adding a suggestion to use specific color palettes for the map. I want to stress the difficulty of creating adequate maps with color palettes that consist of colorblind-friendly triads since many colorblind people have difficulty differentiating colors.

I may apply the knowledge that I’ve gained here to create more intricate and/or fanciful maps. I’m a big fan of world-building and that’s especially the case when I’m writing stories or designing roleplaying game campaigns.

For my design, I decided it should be informative, yet also simplistic and pleasing to look at. To accomplish this, I chose easy-to-identify images for the front of the carton, simply explaining the apple flavor of the creamer. I also chose an aesthetically-pleasant color palette to use for the background so that no particular color would pop quite as well as the coffee cup and the apple on the front, and keep the type-on-a-circle graphics from blending into the whiteish colors on the background. I also kept the Elmhurst logo from being too light or too dark, as I thought there should be a happy medium within the disparity.

Even after using Illustrator in Intro to Digital Media, I could not have been more unprepared to work with the pen tool, but luckily the directions were available on the template itself.

I found it easy to keep up with the directions and successfully draw the shapes I needed to. I’m happy I could understand so that I wouldn’t waste much time trying to figure out the controls.

The only real trouble that I had with the pen tool was that it would sometimes not give me the expected results, even if I had tried every curvature mode that I could think of. I also found it hard to memorize these tricks, so I’ll have to come back to the document and brush up.

I’m not looking forward to using the pen tool in the future, but I know I’ll definitely need to. In those cases, I expect that it’s to carefully dissect an image to grab some elements out of it and use them elsewhere, and I suppose that goes for many images from nature, which is not very geometric by default.

I think that the Lab 5 screencast helped me through this the best. I think it’s interesting that I was so lost before using screencasts that they help me a lot more when I end up watching them.

Finally! A brick rose!

For this lab, I learned a few skills that let me take pictures from a foreground image and apply them to different backgrounds. I also learned how to use shapes from other layers to form easy pattern designs out of background images. Here, the magnetic lasso tool was used on the above rose, and the pen tool was used on the above banana.

I thought the easiest part of this lab was using the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the rose. I’ve done something similar earlier in the semester in DMA201, so using what I had learned wasn’t very difficult.

The most challenging part of this lab was having the patience to work with the pen tool. It took me a few tries to find the right pen tool so I could use it how I wanted to. In the end, I think it worked nicely.

I think that I can improve the rose. Part of masking the rose out of the original selection based itself on removing the alpha value of some of the petals, and that doesn’t satisfy me very much in terms of appearance.

I think that the directions for the Background Eraser were a little ambiguous. Perhaps it’s my version of Photoshop or it’s a different feature, but I found it a little confusing that setting a protected color didn’t have much use, as the first color the eraser is introduced to will start becoming erased. I had to actively start erasing the background itself for it to work properly.

If I’m ever introduced to an image with foreground elements that I want to isolate, I can be sure to use these tools to apply them to different backgrounds and expose backgrounds to patterns. I suppose I’ll have use for it soon as my digital art and influence develops.

Here is the textured fill layer and gradient layer of my Lab 4. I figured I should include the gradient layer simply because the gradient shape didn’t export to jpeg very well, and I love gradients regardless.

I learned how to create a new texture with the offset and clone stamp features, and I figure I may use it in the future for specific reasons, but not for general backgrounds or important features because of its repetitive nature.

I found it easy to use gradients, as my past experience in Krita and Photoshop gave me the insight I needed to use them correctly.

I didn’t quite understand why creating a seamless texture was so difficult… Even before settling with the cork board shown above, I experimented and found that many factors of everyday textures are chaotic and frustrating when offset and edited to appear seamless.

Perhaps next time I can find a more interesting pattern.

I’d still appreciate it if pattern making wasn’t so difficult, and now that I’ve made one, I don’t think I’ll be using it for any large-scale projects.

I’ve learned to be more patient with my work, and I plan to carry out more projects with this newly-gained fortitude.

I didn’t find any particularly inspiring articles or works of art to help me with what I did here today.

Although the construction of the card is relatively easy, I soon learned that the separation of the front of the card and the back of the card in separate artboards would prove to be difficult, as it’s somewhat unclear as to what needed to be done for both artboards to show up in the final pdf. I understand, now, that the image above is supposed to reflect the outside of the card, when I was planning on having it reflect the inside, but it’s still just a minor fix. As far as I was concerned, the reading didn’t help me much with fixing this issue, but I learned enough from what it was communicating in terms of creating such works.

Upon creating these images, I hoped to see some sort of difference between the default coloration and the gamut-decreased version but learned that there was “not much” for Photoshop to change.

The gamut difference didn’t prove to be much here, either. I wish I’d known how vibrant Photoshop considers pixels in order for gamut reduction to make any difference. This was perhaps the most challenging part of the assignment since it took me longer than I expected to notice any difference, but in the end, I couldn’t find anything.

When it comes to saturation differences, I’m usually skilled when trying to identify by pixel, but I’m terrible when it comes to blended colors and images. Perhaps that is somewhere that I can focus to develop a better sense of image design in the future.

These images of my water bottle are both taken from my phone, but the first of the two was taken with the phone’s selfie camera. My biggest note of the difference between the two shots is that the sharpness is much greater in the front camera, where the selfie camera feels softer, and doesn’t differentiate well between shapes that are further away.

Now to look at something up close…

My second observation between the two cameras comes from this set, with a magazine from my house’s newspaper shelf. I noticed that the selfie camera adds some sheen of light that doesn’t show up from the front camera. I’m guessing that the selfie camera is more generalized to deal with all kinds of light, where the front camera has the capabilities to adjust to different situations and help improve the quality.

These four images follow the scan instructions for the lab, and I can see that the clearest difference between all of them is the size that each of them takes, thanks to the resolution that they all share. I admit, WordPress helps to show this difference because of the resolution it tries to keep. Thanks to my home scanner, each image is also cropped precisely to the size it needs to be to show all the content, emphasizing the difference.

Finally, there’s this small flower sketch that I used in a photo editing program. I gave these dimensions to the image since there’s nothing very lavish about the image itself, but I figured it should have a good ratio and orientation to offset its mundanity.