BW: Music Festival Poster and Reflection on Production

The techniques I used in Photoshop were:

• Enhance, Adjust lighting, Levels - I did this to make one half of the poster to look like it is night.
• Rectangular marquee tool - This was used to select one half of the sky which I could the copy and paste onto the background layer.
• Eraser tool - I used this to soften the edges of the inserted image to make it seem as if it is really part of the image. Basically to make it seem less obvious that the image has been pasted into a different background.
• Transform, skew - This was to tilt the text.
• Move tool - This was used simply to change the size and positioning of the text.
• Horizontal type tool - This was used just to put the text in.

Photoshop enables creativity because you are able to completely alter the foundations of an image. You can create illusions using Photoshop by changing the levels of light, blurring things, or by inserting new images over different images. My idea was to make one half the poster in day-time and the other half to be night. I wanted to do this to give the impression that the music lasts all day and goes late into the night. Photoshop enabled me to create such an effect as you are able to change the light levels of an image. I selected one half of the image, copied and pasted it over the original background, and then adjusted the light levels to make it seem like night. Another good thing about it is that it wasn't just a matter of making the image darker, I could also change the level of red, green, or blue in the image. At night the lighting is more of a blue hue. So I made the red almost invisible as red is the first colour on the spectrum that humans lose sight of, and I increased the level of blue while slightly lowering the levels of green. A problem with this version of Photoshop is that I wasn't able to change the perspective on the text. I wanted to have all the band names down on the road and I wanted to make it seem as if we are looking down onto the writing, in the same way we look down on the writing in the Star Wars openings.

In my opinion my finished product was mediocre and that it definitely could have been better. One example of this is how 'July' is difficult to see with the yellow not being vibrant enough against the white cloud background. In terms of the brief I think I've been successful as I've learnt how to effectively use Photoshop. My music festival poster matches certain criteria for the practice production; for example I think that the layout is conventional and that the content is appropriate for the target audience. I've also inserted text and a photo, and created a different background as the brief required. However I did not use the clone stamp tool which was also a part of the brief.

Moving onto the digipack and magazine advert, the advice I would give myself is to properly know where I'm going with my idea. During this practice production I found myself occasionally just staring at the screen because my idea wasn't full enough or complete, and so I didn't know what to do next. Another piece of advice I would give myself is to be more realistic. I think that the vision in my head may have been too complex for my level of skill or for the software in general. The product didn't look as nice as I saw the idea in my head.