My experience in photoshop

Hello everyone, here is my experience of history brush tool in photoshop

Come to the magic world

Magic  is an attempt to understand, experience and influence the world using rituals, symbols and language in a manner similar to religion. 

———————Wikipedia

The theme of my Text/Image Project is magic. I believe most of you would easily associate the word magic with the story of J.K.Rowling’s fantasy novels—Harry Potter. In that series, she gave us an unbelievable world where everything in daily life would have magic power. I love the story very much so I chose this topic.

Many elements of my images came from the Harry Potter movies . In my visual concept image, I used the dining room of Hogwarts magic school as the background. Harry Potter is flying across it, along with several magic items, such as the Marauder’s Map, the Time Turner, the Sorting hat and the Philosopher’s Stone. The idea I want to express here is flying, which is always the first thing we think of when we hear the word magic. I tried a 3D effect to make it look more like Harry is flying.

An image of the castle in Hogwarts was necessary so I included it in the background of my word cloud image. The word cloud filled the shape of the castle. To make it more conspicuous, I added some magic effects on the words “Harry” and “Potter” and added a picture of Harry and a picture of Dumbledore holding their wands.

For my text-on-a-path image, Voldemort, who represents the evil side, became the focus. The words “This is my world, everything is mine!” coming from his wand shows us his ambition.

As for the masked text image, I used the picture of the Marauder’s Map as the background. We can only see a small part of the map through the mask so that makes the map more mysterious.

I learned much through this project:

1. Photoshop is not as easy as I thought. Sometimes I feel the tool is easy to handle but when I try it, it takes lots of time.
2. Expressing a concept using an image is not easy, especially an abstract concept, even if you are super familiar with it.
3. Showing relevant items is a good way to say something about an abstract concept, instead of using words.
4. Feedback is powerful. Sometimes I feel I have used up all of my creativity, but I can always get improvement from other’s suggestions.

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A magic world

The theme of my text/ Image project is magic. I believe most of you would easily combine the word magic with J.K Rowling’s fantasy novels Harry Potter. The following is the process of how I make my word cloud image.

I started with a picture of Hogwarts. This castle is a part of Hogwarts. Hogwarts is the center of magic so I chose it as the background.

 

Then I used magic wand tool in Photoshop to remove the blue sky, applied black color to the main castle and white to the background to make it as the base of word cloud.

 

Next I went to Tegxedo website, submitted a piece of introduction of Harry Potter from Wikipedia, loaded my castle base. The following word cloud came out after some revisions of font and color.

 

After I put the word cloud on the castle background, I found the words was not that conspicuous. So I tried some small steps to make up. First of all I reduced the opacity and filling percentage. Then I selected two main regions in the word cloud by lasso tool: Harry and Potter. And I created another layer and gave some layer effects to make it more conspicuous.

 

 

So far it was done in some degree. However, I found there is some empty space in the sky so I wanted to add two characters to make it more like a magic world. Obviously the first one came to my mind was Harry Potter. The second privilege I finally gave to Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts.

 Here was the original pictures of Harry Potter and Dumbledore.

 

 At last I selected the main parts of the two characters by quick selection tool in Photoshop and pasted them to the main plot. They were holding their wands over Hogwarts. So cool!

 

Combination of words and pictures

To be honest, for me,  a pure science major student( I am a statistics major guy), to read a long and tedious fragment with words only is extremely painful. Sometimes even some formulas and notations make me more comfortable than pure words. You may consider me as a geek.

As McClound says in the comics, the combination of words and pictures is product over centuries. We started with pictures only, but sometimes pictures couldn’t convey a specifice meaning. For instance, the body of a nutrituion bottle will tell the ingredients proportion, as well as direction and some other information. This information may not be easily substituded by pictures. However, pictures will be straight forward and vivid. It makes me crazy when reading instructions of a new electronic machine if without illustration.

Another reason to make the combination necessary is people nowadays always read pictures faster than words to grasp the main meaning. I would be desparate if my classmates told me the paper to be read tonight has 30 or 40 pages. But I would come to live again if they told me half of the pages are with all pictures. I love the blogs with many pictures. After reading this kind of blogs, I will be so proud: Wow, in just a few minutes, I got so much information!

At the beginning, I thought to attach an interesting picture at last to support my idea. Now I won’t do that. I will leave this blog words only to make it uninteresting, to support idea as well.