OUGD405 Design Process- Typogateux

I joined a group with Ellen and Laura after they had already grouped together their ideas. After they had briefed me the ideas and told me about their favourites we had a discussion and created a shortlist of; leaning tower of type, helveticake and helveti-spaghetti.  After going back and forth between ideas, helveti-spaghetti was decided upon. For the cake we used the hairy bikers basic sponge cake;

Helveti-spaghetti consisted of creating a bowl out of sponge cake, filling it with red icing and white iced Helvetica letters. First of all we made the cake mixture and cooked it in a round cylindrical cake tin to make it easier to carve into a bowl.

The helveti-cake failed because we needed to create a deep cake to be carved into a bowl, however it was too deep to be cooked throughout meaning the top was burnt but the inside was still gooey. After 2 attempts at burning the cake we decided to give up on that idea and go for our back up cake which was the Helveticake. 

The Helveticake simply consisted of creating a black or grey cake and cutting out 'Helveticake' in helvetica pt 250. Using the same cake mixture we added black food colouring to try and create a black cake but this was harder than we thought. the best we were able to create was the dark grey cake shown below. the cake mixture didn't provide us with a thick enough cake so we baked 2 and sandwiched jam in between the two. The process to create the Helveticake are shown below;

Trimming the cake

We experimented with wrapping the letters of the cake in grey icing to give them a smoother outer texture.

However from the image below it was a lot harder than originally thought to get the desired look and finish, therefore we decided to leave the cake in its raw and naked form. I love how each layer is revealed by looking at it side on and also the texture created by peeling off the top upper crust. It has a porous texture to it and accompanied with the dark grey colouring it resembles something similar to volcanic rock.

This is the final cake and how we presented it, luckily the pink and white sheets that were already laid out contrasts our cake and adds to what is a quite simple cake compared to some of the competitors in the class. The edge wasn't as clean cut as i would have like meaning the cake looked a bit rough and there was a few crumbs scattered about, but overall as a grouped we were extremely happy with the outcome after all the stress of the failed cakes before it. 

OUGD405 Design Process- photoshop workshop

Scripts

To upload multiple images into one document open images via scripts and load files from stack...

Browse for images, for this we are using the Chicago Bean

Smart object is displayed in photoshop but is editable outside of photoshop. If we save all images as smart object it will collapse all the images onto one layer as opposed to multiple layers. To edit a smart object just double click and it opens all layers.

By going to layers, smart object, stack mode and selecting median it removes all people from the foreground.

 Before

After

However the sky is really blurry, to rectify this go to file, place and select an image with a sky you prefer.

But the people return to the meaning we need to delete sections of the photo but it's a smart object. To rasterise the layer, right click on the layer and rasterise layer. This allows to select sections.

Use the quick selection tool to select only the sky, select inverse and delete, this leaves us with only the sky on that layer.

File formats 

Lossless- For print based images (PSD when working on it, TIFF when finished)
Lossy-  Compress images to load quicker for screen based images (JPEG)
PDF portable document format 

OUGD405 Design Process- Photoshop workshop

Proofing a photo

To make turn an image into CMYK (print) you could use 2 methods; image, mode, CMYK colour. However this is destructive which means once saved and reopened there's no way to get the original image back. This could cause problems if working for a publication that wanted an image for print but then realise it would also look good on their website.

To get around this we use proof colours, this enables us to view the colours it'll print out. We can tell from using this the photo will print out considerably duller.  

To find out what colours will print out well we can use the gamut warning. Gamut = colour range; therefore if it's out of gamut, the colour is out of range. 
Below we have used gamut warning and from this we can tell that the photo is vastly out of the CMYK colour range because of the grey parts.

If we change the hue (the colour of the light) to red the grey parts vanish, meaning the photo is now in gamut range and is a much clearer image. 

We always have to proof to show as well.

Making sections of an image clearer

To make certain sections of an image clearer we can make the photo lighter by using levels. By altering the white levels we can make the image a lot lighter to reveal the mosaics on the ceiling.

However the glass on the roof has become far to light and we have lost all detail, by masking the sections of glass we can affect what sections of the photo are affected by the change in levels. To mask sections off we simply block different parts of the glass on the levels layer with the black paintbrush tool. 

By masking the glass sections we end up with the original glass coming from the original layer.

There is another way to lighten specific parts of a photo (mask). By using the quick selection tool we can select only the statue because it is so dark in contrast to the sky.

Once the image is selected we can then change the levels in a non-destructive way same as the previous technique.

However changing the levels has also changed the levels of the clouds in the tiny gaps in the statue that show clouds. To fix this simply magic wand the white bits, edit, fill, and fill them black which simply masks them off.

We can also alter the clouds by selecting the clouds using the quick selection tool, selecting hue/saturation and playing around with colour.

Creating panoramic images

Go to file, automate and photo merge. It should then bring up a window similar to the one below, from here upload the set of images you wish to align and merge.

Something similar to the image below should be created and all that is left to do is to crop the image to a rectangular shape to neaten the edges.