The document summarizes the steps taken to manipulate a photo and design a magazine cover in Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. The photo was edited in Photoshop by removing the background using selection tools, refining edges, and patching imperfections. Colors were corrected and a black and white filter was applied. The manipulated photo and text elements like the magazine masthead were added in InDesign to design draft magazine covers. Feedback was incorporated into further drafts by adding more elements and refinements until the final design was completed.
2. PHOTO MANIPULATION
The first step in photo manipulation was taking the original
image and inserting it into Adobe Photoshop in order to
remove the background of the image so that it may be
used within the final production. For this I used the magic
wand tool to do the majority of the work. The magic wand
tool simply allows the user to click and select an area of a
similar colour which can then be deleted with ease and so
was the most appropriate tool for use in this job.
3. BACKGROUND
After the use of the magic wand tool I then noticed that some grain was
left around the edge of the image and so had to remove it with more
fine tuned tools, in order to properly see what I was doing I added a
blue background to the image since it showed the particles best. I then
used the refine edge tool which involved selecting the image outline
with the magic wand, clicking the tool, adjusting its parameters to suit
the image and then rendering the new image minus the edge.
4. PATCH TOOL
After having successfully removed the
edge from the image I moved on to
making the image itself look even
better than it did. The first stage of this
was to use the patch tool in order to
remove any imperfections within the
image. This was a process of selecting
an area in which no problems were
present and was of the same
colour/material e.g. another part of the
suit and then dragging this selection
onto the part of the image with the
problem and then pressing Ctrl+F until
a suitable match was found.
5. COLOUR CORRECTION
Initially I began to colour correct
the image using things such as
auto colour correction within
Photoshop in order to bring out
the colours of the image to a
greater extent. This helped with the
final result of the image since the
colours are more distinguishable
and so the black and white
gradient will have worked better
than it may have otherwise.
6. BLACK AND WHITE
I then added a black and white image filter
to the image since I felt it was more
appropriate for the magazine cover I was
hoping to make in addition to it being
slightly unique in the fact not many action
posters adopt this effect. This was very
simple to implement, all it required was for
the user to select the layer of the image
and apply a gradient to it.
7. INDESIGN
I now began to create the magazine
front cover as a whole. I saw the
first logical step to be creating the
masthead of the magazine and
adding some titles to the page in
pre-emption of adding the main
anchorage. As you can see I created
the “Film WEEKLY” masthead and
added the “End Process” tagline in
this stage of production. This was a
simple process of adding text since
I had already identified the fonts I
wished to use in my house style
task.
8. DRAFT 1
This is what I considered to be my first draft, still missing
many features it is not the most visually appealing
magazine cover at this point in time, I liked the current
placement of my image and masthead, but was left
uncertain about the amount of space left under the tagline.
Placing the image into InDesign was easy due to Adobe
cross compatibility allowing such transfers between the
program to be very simple to do.
9. DRAFT 2
This was draft 2, as you can see I added several more
features into the space which concerned me beforehand.
This included a Puff/Pug, other films and a barcode at the
bottom. This helped to bring the magazine cover together
more but there was still a large gap by my elbow and so I
had to think of some more items to go there. Making the
Puff/Pug involved creating a circular shape with the “Oval”
tool in InDesign and then adding text onto that shape
using the features within InDesign. I made the puff pug
black in order to fit my house style whilst the text inside it
was the other colours of the style, I thought it fit in well
with the rest of the poster. I created the barcode using an
online generator so that it only links to my magazine.
10. FINAL PRODUCT
This is the completed product, the main differences
between this one and draft 2 is the addition of a shadow to
the Puff/Pug, as per suggestion from peer review which
helped make the puff/pug stand out more on the
magazine cover. As well as this I added text to the barcode
stating the date, and above this the website for the
magazine. I also shortened the date on top of the
masthead in order to make it less intrusive and instead
used the one on the barcode as the full date for reference
purposes.