DPI - Exercises

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY & IMAGING GCD 61204

29 August 2022 - 19 September 2022 / Week1 - 4

NAME: Sim Jia Min
I.D: 0349784
COURSE: Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
GROUP: 2

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INSTRUCTIONS (MIB)

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LECTURES

Week 1: Today is the first day of class and meeting the lecturer of this module, Mr Fauzi. Mr Fauzi gave a brief introduction to this module, we will learn how to use Adobe Photoshop this semester. Using Photoshop is a fundamental skill for every designer, so I look forward to learning about it in this module. After the brief intro, we played the Bezier Game, which is for us to practice using the pen tool. The game was easy at first, but then a few rounds later I personally found it became a bit difficult and confusing. 

Week 1 lecture slide

Youtube tutorial of composition studies: collage

We are given a task to make a physical collage design by using any items: magazines, books, or any reusable item.

Week 2: The lecture of today is about the basic composition in design. There are some principles can include in the composition such as balance, hierarchy, space, focal point, etc. We also learned about the rule of thirds and golden ratio, they are both useful for object placement and position when creating a composition. All these basic compositions in design can be applied on the collage design, which is an exercise for our practical class.

Week 2 lecture slide

Week 3: Today is the introduction of photoshop interface. We learned about the basic use of lasso tool and pen tool to crop out certain objects from images, these tools are going to be applied to our digital collage design. The magic wand tool is suitable for cropping objects with a plain background. Some images were given by Mr Fauzi for creating 3 digital collage designs, before that, he also show us some tutorial videos. 

Week 3 lecture slide

Youtube tutorial of  paths, masking, layering & blending modes

Week 4: Physical class was cancelled and changed to online class today due to Mr Fauzi feeling under the weather. 

Week 4 lecture slide

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PRACTICAL - Exercises

W1: Creating E-portfolio 

Instruction:

1. Bezier Game https://bezier.method.ac
2. Create your E-Portfolio blog.
3. Register Pinterest.
4. List down your 3 favourite graphic design composition work from Pinterest. Explain it on your E-portfolio blog, why do you like the designs?

Bézier Game 

Figure 1.1: Bézier Game 

3 favourite graphic design composition work

Design #1: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/819092250994503007/

Designer: Vasilis Marmatakis

Figure 1.2: The Lobster Movie Poster

Description: This is a movie poster that has attracted me ever since I saw it on Pinterest a few years ago. I like the way it contains big negative space which makes it look minimalistic and clean but yet contains every piece of information about the movie. The negative spaces create silhouettes of a person, which make both protagonists in the poster look like they are hugging an “erased” person, it describes some sort of loneliness feeling in a relationship. This poster design is a genius marketing to promote a movie because it can make viewers feel curious about the deep meaning behind it, and convince them to watch the movie. To summarise, this is a perfect movie poster, probably one of the best poster designs I have ever seen.

Design #2: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/819092250994540821/

Album cover illustrator + singer: Grimes

Figure 1.3: "Visions" Album Cover

Description: This is a studio album cover of “Visions” by Grimes. The thing I love about this album cover is the illustration, especially the unique hand-drawn 3D typography with different languages: Japanese, Russian & English. Except for one thing, I do not like about the typography is that the vertical line text of Japanese is actually meaningless, the words make absolutely no sense, I think they are just there for the aesthetic, but at least they do look really cool. I also love how the layout is neatly composed on this album cover, with the illustration on the left as the main point of the cover, while the artist name, album name and other information are on the rest of the part.

Design #3: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/819092250994502685/

Designer: Unknown

Figure 1.4: The Marías Cinema Live Tour 2022

Description: This is a live tour poster of an indie band, The Marías. I love how this tour poster contained an elegant and calming atmosphere in it, perhaps it is because of the typefaces, simple colour scheme and clean layout. The dates, areas, and locations are highly well-arranged, it makes me feel visually satisfied.

W2: Collage Design Elements

Instruction:

1. Choose and identify your collage's design elements to be cut out and compose it into your own concept & story.
2. Pre-compositing your collage's design elements into a composition.
Reference: https://youtu.be/2KqXGMf0HNk
3. Take 3 photo of your collage pre-composition and insert it on the section below
4. Submit (Turn In) this W2_TUTORIAL

For this exercise, I cut out images from some old fashion magazines from years ago. Some cool things about these fashion magazines are that they always have some really unique typefaces and decent photography, but of course they should be well done because there are a bunch of professional designers and photographers working on fashion magazines behind the scene. Therefore, making these beautiful elements into a collage is a very enjoyable process for me. There is no specific storylines for all of my 3 collages, they are just some random elements with composition.

1. PRE-COMPOSITION #1

Figure 2.1: The first collage. Obviously, the focal point of the collage is the short hair girl in the middle. Since I cutout many typeface elements, so I just arrange them together with the photos as decorates. 

2. PRE-COMPOSITION #2

Figure 2.2: Second collage. I rearrange the elements from first collage into different composition, also added a few new elements.

3. PRE-COMPOSITION #3

Figure 2.3: Third collage. This one is much more different than the first and second collage since I want to try out with some other new elements and also want the collage to be in vertical. Compare with the previous collages, this collage is much more varied in colours, also messier.

W3: Digital Collage

INSTRUCTION:

1. Download all of the images here to your computer: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cGcbENrjSksAaMQK9np2jb6ZaM7Y-81l?usp=sharing
2. Follow this tutorial demo as reference to create your digital collage: https://youtu.be/BlW7F-fTsbE
3. Create 3 different composition digital collages from the images that you’ve downloaded.
4. Create A4 canvas size (vertical) on Photoshop and start to do the compositions.
5. Take 3 photo of your digital collage compositions and insert it on the section below
6. Submit (Turn In) this file in Google Classroom

1. COMPOSITION #1 (Best Composition)

Figure 3.2: First collage

The concept of this collage is to create an underwater world, with both fishes and humans. This idea is inspired by underwater city concept I have seen in some animated films. Also the given elements such as fishes, plants and train station photo can be use in this concept, so I decided to go for it. 

Creation process (include adjustment & filter)

Figure 3.2.1: The original image

Figure 3.2.2: I crop the image into vertical A4 size

Figure 3.2.3: I adjust the colour balance to make the whole image have the underwater atmosphere. I increased the blue, cyan & magenta of midtone
 

Figure 3.2.4: Added some grain effect at the filter gallery panel

Figure 3.2.5: Added some fish in the photo

Figure 3.2.6: Crop out the people in the photo to make the fish stay behind them. (repeat the same steps for other fish)

Figure 3.2.7: Add some plants to imitate the seagrass.

And that's all for the process.

2. COMPOSITION #2

Figure 3.2.8: Second collage

3. COMPOSITION #3

Figure 3.2.9: Third collage

W4: Adjustment Layers & Filters

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FINAL SUBMISSION

My final submission of project 1, which is both physical collage and digital collage. 

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REFLECTION

Collage is something that I always see people make in their journals, seems fun to make but I never have the motivation to start doing it, so this project is definitely a new and interesting experience for me. The physical collage is very fun to do because we are able to choose any physical images to create a composition, while digital collage is much more challenging for me since only limited resources were given. At first, I thought the limited resources for digital collage is difficult to make because none of the images match each other, so I just arranged the images to try out any compositions and see which one is better. The outcomes were surprisingly not bad. Making collages in Photoshop has made me learn to use the pen tool to crop out images because before doing this project I had always only used lasso tool or selection tool to crop images, I never knew that pen tool is also an option.