Lesson #13

This lesson, we learnt to use more Photoshop tools and we started on InDesign. We learnt photo edges, texture effect and adding transparent text.

Before.

After.

Learning new things like this on Photoshop is always cool, because it would seem really hard and confusing at first, but when we follow instructions closely and really do what we're supposed to do instead of straying off, the final result is always very satisfying.

For this exercise, I was very satisfied with my results, because I've always seen pictures like this floating around the internet but I've never really thought how to go about doing it. After obtaining this result, I felt really accomplished and happy that I managed to do it despite the confusing steps.

We did another exercise where we learnt to use refining edges for selecting hair.

Before.

We combined these two pictures together to get this:

After.

We used the lasso tool to crop her out from the picture and pasted her onto the background of the beach. Then we refined the edges especially her hair to make it look more realistic. It was a challenge to crop the lady with her hair flying all around as I kept cropping the wrong part and there were many extra parts of the images in it. At the end, I was really happy I managed to do it because I can use this tools to edit more photos for fun next time. We then tried our new skill on another picture.

Before.

We used the two pictures above. Cropped the hair from the guy and pasted in on David Beckham's head to give him some hair.

After.

My final result of David Beckham with hair.

We had our first attempt on InDesign and this is my least favourite software. We covered document setup, the right number of columns to put in and gutters and margins. We then tried to do a sample brochure by importing text and images.

This was challenging as I still couldn't get used to InDesign. It was hard to get the text in as I had to constantly adjust the kerning and all. I had difficulties trying to fit in all the text onto this page because I couldn't adjust the text in a way that it was readable yet able to fit into the page. I did it in the end with the help of people around me and felt such a sense of achievement when I finally managed to get my above results, even though it is not the best.

I had to improve on my InDesign skills as we had to do our CA (brochure designing) on this software.