Overall Comments
Overall I thought this was a good attempt at the assignment. You have obviously put a lot of work into both shooting the right photograph for the job and producing the final cover image. There were a couple of visual and technical issues that I have highlighted below but nothing major and certainly nothing that requires a major revision. I have worked through an example with one of your other images to show how you could end up with a more refined final result. I have also added a couple of somewhat pedantic points from a technical perspective –the first on trim and bleed sizes that, if you are not designing books, you don’t need to know but are critical in making sure pages look how they are supposed to and the second on colour spaces vs colour profiles. Again, nothing major but the kind of knowledge we need to clarify before you progress to level 3.
Assessment potential
I understand your aim is to go for the Photography Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, and providing you commit yourself to the course, I suggest that you are likely to be successful in the assessment.
Feedback on assignment
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
I thought the choice of image was successful. I am generally against having a single element of a photograph coloured with the rest black and white but it does highlight the choice aspect here so I will try not to have a moan...! As it is a cover and not a photograph in its own right I could see how it can be argued as acceptable.
Overall I thought this was a good attempt at the assignment. You have obviously put a lot of work into both shooting the right photograph for the job and producing the final cover image. There were a couple of visual and technical issues that I have highlighted below but nothing major and certainly nothing that requires a major revision. I have worked through an example with one of your other images to show how you could end up with a more refined final result. I have also added a couple of somewhat pedantic points from a technical perspective –the first on trim and bleed sizes that, if you are not designing books, you don’t need to know but are critical in making sure pages look how they are supposed to and the second on colour spaces vs colour profiles. Again, nothing major but the kind of knowledge we need to clarify before you progress to level 3.
Assessment potential
I understand your aim is to go for the Photography Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, and providing you commit yourself to the course, I suggest that you are likely to be successful in the assessment.
Feedback on assignment
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
I thought the choice of image was successful. I am generally against having a single element of a photograph coloured with the rest black and white but it does highlight the choice aspect here so I will try not to have a moan...! As it is a cover and not a photograph in its own right I could see how it can be argued as acceptable.
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Within the context of the book cover, the image works well and the reflection
in the lens along with the model’s gesture both point well to the idea of a protagonist making a choice. From a conceptual point of view your submission works well.
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There is some purple fringing in the lower left of the coloured section that
you need to remove before submitting the final version. This made me open
up the cover in photoshop and I saw that your masking of the lens wasn’t
great so I feel it might be useful for me to run through a basic workflow that
could help you achieve more polished results in the future.
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There are numerous ways of making a selection in Photoshop. I picked one of
the other portraits from your contact sheet and used a method involving the
Quick Mask function. I used Photoshop CC and am not sure of the differences
between this and Elements but this should at least provide a framework for
the future. My workflow was as follows:
o Select the Brush tool (‘B’) and paint over the sunglass lens. You should
see a slightly translucent red colour being applied to the image that shows where you are selecting. If not, Press X to toggle the add/remove quality of the brush.
o Now paint inside the lens carefully. If you go over an edge, press X and you can paint over the parts where you have gone over the edge.
o Once you have a reasonable looking area painted in you can turn this into a selection simply by exiting Quick Mask (press ‘Q’). You will see the marching ants outlining your selection. Don’t worry if it looks a little rough, we will fix that in the next step.
o Go to the Select Menu and choose ‘Inverse’. This swaps the selection from the overall image excluding the lens to just the lens.
o Make sure you have the lasso tool selected and then select ‘Refine Edge’ from the tool menu. You can then use the range of options to make your selection more precise. I simply clicked the check box for ‘Smart Radius’ and adjusted the radius to 1.6px as this looked like a reasonably smooth selection.
o Make sure the Output was set to ‘New Layer with Layer mask’ and click Ok.
o You will now have a new layer that just shows the coloured lens. If you look at the layers palette you will see we have a copy of our background layer but with a layer mask. The layer mask only allows the area we selected to show, so in this case the lens of the sunglasses.
o We are almost done. All we need to do is make the background layer Black and white.
o Click on the background layer in the Layers window, making sure it is visible, and then go to the bottom of the window and click the ‘Create new fill or adjustment layer’ icon (the circle that is split half and half into light and dark), and select ‘black and white’. What we have done
here is created a new layer just above the background but below the
coloured lens layer that converts the image to black and white. You
can adjust the conversion using the sliders visible in the Properties
palette when the Black and White layer is selected.
o Finally, select the top layer with the coloured lens, make sure the image and not the mask is selected, and then open a levels dialog to lighten it slightly. By working this way with layers and layer masks, every step is independently undoable and you have far more control over the whole process.
o Now save this as a tiff or PSD file as your master. You can add additional layers for text etc as needed, and even extend the canvas size to accommodate the entire cover and add the back cover and spine as needed.
o When you are finished, save this file again with the layers as the master. We can then create derivatives as jpgs or similar whilst still being able to go back and edit the original as needed.
o Before saving as a jpg you will need to flatten the image from within the layers palette menu. Be careful not to save over the master file after you have flattened the layers as this will remove your ability to edit the layers separately. Once flattened, convert to the required colour space and save as whatever file type needed.
The above workflow could also have been done by selecting the overall image rather than the lens and creating a layer mask before then creating an adjustment layer making that black and white. Both method achieve the same thing but in a slightly different way. Use whichever you feel most comfortable with. As you can see, once you start thinking about layers and
o Finally, select the top layer with the coloured lens, make sure the image and not the mask is selected, and then open a levels dialog to lighten it slightly. By working this way with layers and layer masks, every step is independently undoable and you have far more control over the whole process.
o Now save this as a tiff or PSD file as your master. You can add additional layers for text etc as needed, and even extend the canvas size to accommodate the entire cover and add the back cover and spine as needed.
o When you are finished, save this file again with the layers as the master. We can then create derivatives as jpgs or similar whilst still being able to go back and edit the original as needed.
o Before saving as a jpg you will need to flatten the image from within the layers palette menu. Be careful not to save over the master file after you have flattened the layers as this will remove your ability to edit the layers separately. Once flattened, convert to the required colour space and save as whatever file type needed.
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| My tutors outcome by using the above workflow |
The above workflow could also have been done by selecting the overall image rather than the lens and creating a layer mask before then creating an adjustment layer making that black and white. Both method achieve the same thing but in a slightly different way. Use whichever you feel most comfortable with. As you can see, once you start thinking about layers and
layer masks in Photoshop you will see how much control you can have over
local corrections within a photograph.
local corrections within a photograph.
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The other thing I wasn’t 100% about was the black and white text. The title
gets a bit lost so it would be useful to see examples with the fonts in different colours within your supporting material to justify the choice. Generally the title of a book needs to leap out to readers, but I felt here it blended in a bit much with the photograph.
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A couple of short, somewhat pedantic notes but I should point them out
anyway. Where you specify the cover size you accurately note that the cover
should be (front cover width + spine width + back cover width) x cover height.
In your case this works out as (148mm +12.81mm + 148mm) x
210mm=308.81mm x 210mm as you suggest. Firstly, you mention that this is
approximate, which is sort of correct. The final size will be within a tolerance
set by a printer but you would also need to allow for the trim area. This is
basically where the image would go slightly over the outside edge of the
cover to allow for slight inaccuracies when the covers are being cut.
Photoshop isn’t really designed for layouts so doesn’t make you aware of
this. If you were to design a cover for a real book in the future, I would
suggest using Adobe Indesign. You can read up on trim size here:
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/glossary/g/Trim-Size.htm and bleed here:
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/glossary/g/bleed.htm. Essentially you
would want your trim size to be 308.81mmx210mm, and your bleed size to
be a little bigger, say 318.81mm x 220mm, allowing a 5mm bleed around the
document that will be removed when printed. If you didn’t have this extra
printed area you could end up with a very thin white border one or more
edges of the document where the printer cuts in slightly the wrong place
(perhaps 0.5mm off for instance...).
- RGB is a colour space, not a profile. Within the colour space there are various profiles, the most common being sRGB, AdobeRGB and ProPhotoRGB.
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Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays
Context
The learning log is coming along well. I noted that you are still experiencing some reservations about level two in general. I certainly wouldn’t give up –your work is coming along well. A lot of the theory is included due to the ‘degree-ness’ of the course, but you needn’t let it suck all of the life out of your work! I would recommend you start really picking subjects for the assignments that you enjoy shooting –let the briefs be a jumping off point for your exploration of photography rather than a slog to tick the required boxes. The next assignment asks you to submit some ideas to me and for me to respond by setting you a personalized brief. I note that you have an interest in music photography so I would suggest we work along those lines. I would suggest you identify a particular band and spend a month or so documenting them in rehearsals and performing. This could be for a fictional online music magazine using a contemporary style of images. This style will depend on the type of band being photographed and I leave this up to you, but you will need a good mix of group photos, portraits, action shots of performance and details of the band interaction off stage. The files should be delivered digitally in a manner suitable for a website (including full screen). Hopefully this brief will bring back some of your interest and reinvigorate your love of photography.
Suggested reading/viewing
Context
Most of the above is covered in the reading list I provided for the last assignment, especially in the Katrin Eismann book ‘Photoshop Masking and Compositing’, which, whilst a little dated, remains useful.
Pointers for the next assignment
See above
I was overall very happy with this feedback. I enjoyed the process of photographing for this even though the book was a tough read. I dont feel like I need to make any adjustments but I did want to test out the step by step guide my tutor gave me about how I processed my image.
The first problem that I encountered was that my tutors guide was for Photoshop and I only have photoshop elements 9 so even though I tried, the instructions were different and I wasnt able to follow them. Luckily, with a new version of photoshop out, I managed to get a free trial download, so here starts my month of excessive photoshop usage. Anyway, with the free trial downloaded I managed to follow the steps:
Now this is where something went wrong.....
Now, my tutors finished example was the same as my original submission, black and white model with coloured lens, so how did I end up with this after following the instructions?!? I tried several times to rectify where I had gone wrong but to no avail. I will say I'm glad that I had the opportunity to attempt it with Photoshop though. I hope to be able to improve on my photoshop skill in the future.
Context
Most of the above is covered in the reading list I provided for the last assignment, especially in the Katrin Eismann book ‘Photoshop Masking and Compositing’, which, whilst a little dated, remains useful.
Pointers for the next assignment
See above
I was overall very happy with this feedback. I enjoyed the process of photographing for this even though the book was a tough read. I dont feel like I need to make any adjustments but I did want to test out the step by step guide my tutor gave me about how I processed my image.
The first problem that I encountered was that my tutors guide was for Photoshop and I only have photoshop elements 9 so even though I tried, the instructions were different and I wasnt able to follow them. Luckily, with a new version of photoshop out, I managed to get a free trial download, so here starts my month of excessive photoshop usage. Anyway, with the free trial downloaded I managed to follow the steps:
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| adding the quick mask |
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| turning off quick mask |
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| selection inverted |
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| refining the edges |
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| about to add the black and white layer mask |
Now this is where something went wrong.....
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| This is what i ended up with??? |
Now, my tutors finished example was the same as my original submission, black and white model with coloured lens, so how did I end up with this after following the instructions?!? I tried several times to rectify where I had gone wrong but to no avail. I will say I'm glad that I had the opportunity to attempt it with Photoshop though. I hope to be able to improve on my photoshop skill in the future.
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