Software Skills

Today we carried out a project to create a poster for a future exhibition/film/book etc that we would have in 10 years’ time. We had to use the three main Adobe design applications- Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

I have to confess the day wasn’t the most exciting day ever as I am already very experienced using Adobe software- I use it every day. Most people were newbies to the software and thus the class was aimed at teaching very basic skills.

I did actually get a chance to go up the front to teach the class something though. It was about using the colour range tool as a means of removing backgrounds from photos while keeping hair edge detail intact, it was a more efficient way than the way which was initially taught. I also went around and helped out a few people around the class.

We used Photoshop to composite a photo of ourselves into a found background image of our choice- I made sure to colour grade the photo of myself to match the background and give the poster some synergy.

Our posters now needed a logo, so we headed over to illustrator to try out a few different designs. I experimented using my name or just my initials and playing around with font and shape.

The final design I settled on was where I placed the S inside of the G to create a new shape.

The final task in InDesign was to bring the logo and image together with 200 words we were to write about our future work. I am terrible at writing things so I settled with the design quite quickly but sat for quite a while facing an empty word document. It wasn’t until I got home before I finished off the writing.

I had a quite nice to talk with the tutor, Anna, during the day about cool ways of doing things that I’d found in Photoshop. I recommended she check out Phlearn, a really great YouTube channel with more advanced photography and Photoshop tutorials.