Beginners guide to producing graphics on Mac

As many of you may know Adobe Photoshop is a highly used and recommended piece of software on a Mac. In my opinion i believe adobe photoshop can be an easy as well as complicated piece of software to use. As an educated media student i am going to explain some of the key tools used within the software, this will be able to widen your knowledge and understanding whilst being able to have a bit of fun with it aswell.

Using adobe photoshop I was set 2 projects which required me to created a film poster and a DVD sleeve, by creating these pieces of work it helped me get to know a bit more about photoshop and how it is used. You can do various different things such as changing the background, editing what people look like and many more. 

If you are thinking on entering the world of graphic design then hopefully this article will enable you to get a better understanding of of the two main systems, Photoshop and Illustrator with these two main softwares it enables you to manipulate different images and allows you to do various other different things.
Adobe Photoshop uses bitmap graphics and is mainly used for image manipulation, whereas Adobe illustrator is mainly used by artist and graphic designers to create vector images, vector images are made up of mainly paths and lines and when finished these are mainly used for things like company logos and can be personal work in print and digital.

On Photoshop i was handed a picture of a girl with oily, spotty skin and was asked to make this girl look practically perfect. To do this i inserted the original photo of the girl onto Photoshop, i then used the spot healing brush to get rid of all the freckles and spots, this was good because it made the girls skin very clear and almost to perfection. When i finished that section i then inserted a new layer and blurred out the image, i did this by using a filter smart blur, then used the eraser brush to hide the parts what were too blurry so it isn't as obvious it had been edited, that section was mainly to focus on her nose, eyebrows, hair and a few more aspects. By doing this it has widened my understanding of the how you can be manipulated into thinking that an image has never been edited, it just shows that you can never trust an image unless you have taken it yourself.

BEFORE!

AFTER!

This image is a JPG also known as a JPEG, A JPG is a common file format for digital photos and other digital graphics, when files are saves they use a lossy compression this means the image quality is lost as the file size decreases. A JPG file is the most common file type for images taken with digital cameras. 

As i have now shown you my project i did to make the girl look perfect, i will now show you my film poster i had to make which included using a few more tools and different aspects of Photoshop. I was asked to create a marketing campaign for a film of my own choice as i will shown you now. 

Firstly i went on google and found a background suitable for my poster in a jpeg format so it would be suitable to stretch for my poster without blurring. I used this image because it is a dark room with nothing really in it,therefore i can fill it with my own sort of stuff. 

I then used the gradient tool on the floor to make it look darker, i did this because on some of the images  took of my characters i took from waist up and they had no legs on the picture, so to disguise that i then used the gradient tool to make the floor dark so you wouldn't see it, after i did that i was glad because it actually made my poster look a lot better. 

  

After choosing my background and inserting it into photoshop i then took my photos of my characters/ models and uploaded them individually. The first photo i chose to upload was this one which was my main character as you can see. I did this by opening a new page and inserting the image of the model onto it

 i then used the magnetic lasso tool to go round my character to get the shape and not the whole of the image because some of it was useless. I then dragged and dropped him into the picture with the background. 

After doing that i adjusted the light, i did this with the gradient tool i did this to enthersise a lighting effect on one side of my model and keep him dark on the other, I thought that this was good because it tied in with the theme horror. 

After doing that I then took another picture of somebody and used the magnetic lasso tool to cut the image out and insert it onto my image, i placed the model further up so it looked like he was in the background. 

I then did the same and inserted another model onto my image making her look further behind the other character. When taking the picture i told my models to look scared to tie in with the theme of my poster. I used the same tool as i did the others to cut the model out and to insert it onto the main image. 

I then added my last character on the right, who i also asked to look scared, which kind of worked... i used the same tool as i used the last 2 times to cut my character out, after i did that i dragged it across onto my main screen. I put my 3 characters on the right because that is where i adjusted the light to make it brighter, because that is the good side. 

I then inserted the character i wanted to look like a ghost, i did this by the same way as all the others, opened a new tab and cut around it and dragged it onto my page. 

 

I then added my character in order to make him more ghost like i used the liquify tool and blended him into the layers with an eraser brush, this then stretched him out so he looked rather blurry and stretched. 

After i used the eraser brush and the liquify tools it came out like this, so i kept the original image and added this on the top to make it look more blurry and scary. 

When i finished messing about with the tool trying to make it look ghost like and try and give it a moving effect this is what it ended up like, which i thought was kind of cool. 

I then added my board, which is basically the whole point of my film poster, because it is about a board game, i located my board game right in the middle of the poster and gave it an outer glow so it sanded out a little bit. I also got the image off google and believe it or not it was really bright and full of colours, so i then put it into photoshop and played around editing it and made it look like it was old fashioned. 

After doing that i then added an age rating to my poster, i did this to show the certificate i created it for, and to show which type of audience it is suitable for. 

I then went on google to find a logo for a company logo who focused on horror and i found this blue house one, i then inserted this onto my poster to give it a sense of realism. 

After that i then inserted a credit bar, which included my own names, and my own words which i made up.  I also did this so it would make it look more real rather than a poster made just on photoshop. 

After finishing the bottom of the poster i inserted my title 'triskadekaphobia' this is a word which means you are scared of the number 13. I went on the internet on a fonts website and chose a suitable font for my style of poster, i then downloaded it and wrote it in that font changed it to red with a shadow effect and inserted it onto my poster. 

After doing that i inserted all the names of my characters i used, i did this in a simple white font all in capitals to make it look professional and inserted it at the top of my poster above my title.

Finally after all this hard work this is my final poster what took me a few days of hard work to get my head round the software, but it was well worth it.



So that concludes photoshop, i hope you all like it. Now lets move on to Adobe Illustrator, i have a feeling you guys will love this software even more.

To create this picture, i used adobe illustrator, i took a picture of myself on photo booth and inserted it onto adobe illustrator to create a cartoon like image of myself. i then used the pen tool to join lines up to get a rough shape of my face. I then created another layer to go round the outline of my lips, and the rest of my facial features. I had to pick various different colours to match my skin tone, eyes and lips etc . I also tried to fill in my t-shirt by doing it with adobe illustrator to make it all look cartoon like. 

When i did this i got kind of frustrated with joining all the lines and things, but hey look at me as a cartoon i think i look pretty cool, just like Photoshop i think having patients and working on this is well worth it, because now I've done it I'm never off the software. 

Anyways i hope found this article useful, yes there are other softwares out there to purchase or to even download for free, but in my opinion i think Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are the 2 best to use. 

I hope you get some guidance off this article and start to use Photoshop and Illustrator a lot more.