Digital Photography and Imaging (Week 01 -Week 04)

25/9/2023- Ending Date / Week 1 - Week 4

Kerly Ooi / 0358726

Digital Photography and Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University

Project 01 / Exercises

LECTURES

Week 01 Lecture : Introduction to Digital Photography and Imaging

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Week 02 Lecture : Introduction to Composition

Balance the element

White space

Rule of Thirds

Golden Ratio mainly used in (UI / UX)

Framing & Cropping

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Week 03 Lecture : Introduction to Photoshop 2

Lasso tool / Pen tool

Practice Bezier game - pen tool

if have white background use (magic W tool)

free transform - to adjust size

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Week 04 Lecture : Introduction to Photoshop 3

Adjustment layer

Filter

Adjustment Layers

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop are a collection of extremely helpful, non-destructive image editing tools that allow you to make colour and tone adjustments to your image without permanently altering its pixels.

You can modify and discard your edits or recover your original image at any moment using the adjustment layers. This will make your Photoshop process more flexible and efficient, and it is a must-know.

Basic understanding of adjustment layers

When we are adding an adjustment layer to an image, a new layer appears over the image and a Properties panel for the type of modification we have chosen appears. The Properties panel allows us to change our adjustment layer, which in turn changes the image(s).

Fig 1.1 Properties panel and Adjustment Layer

Brightness / Contrast

makes adjustments to the tonal range of your image.
Brightness slider is for adjusting the highlights in your image and the Contrast slider is for adjusting the shadows in your image.

Level

modify the tonal values in an image by adjusting the levels of the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.
one of the most used tools in the adjustment layer panel, and using just a touch of levels will go a long way in correcting your images.

Curves

Curves are the most powerful and accurate tool for modifying tones in a picture, allowing you to adjust as many points as you like throughout the whole tonal range of the image.

Exposure

Exposure lets you adjust exposure levels with three sliders: Exposure, Offset and Gamma.
Exposure will adjust only the highlights of the image, Offset adjusts the mid tones and Gamma will adjust the dark tones only.

Selective colour

The Selective Colour adjustment layer selectively modifies the amount of a primary colour without modifying the other primary colours in your image.

Filters

Using filters to edit photos is an essential element of Adobe’s graphics editor.

There are filters to change colour, add blur or create completely new image effects. Photoshop offers a virtually unlimited variety of filters for this purpose.

Week 05 Lecture : Basic Photography Shooting

Digital Photography
Intro to lighting and types
Lighting Do’s & Don’ts

Exposure setting

Exposure : In photography, exposure is the amount of light which reaches your camera sensor or film.

The main parts of the camera:

Camera body:

Shutter
Image sensor
LCD screen

Camera lens:

Aperture/ Iris

The camera body is a light proof box.

Fig 1.2 Diagram of a camera's body and parts

IRIS : Iris / Aperture is control the flow of light entering the lens.

is measured by f-stop, indicated by sequence of f-number: f/1, f/1.4, f/2 , f/ 2.8, f/ 4, f/ 5.6, f/ 8, f/ 11, f/ 16, f/22 , f/32.. etc.
The lower the f-number, the larger the lens opening.

Fig 1.3 Diagram showing how much light each f-stop gives

Shutter : The shutter is a tiny plastic sheet that opens and closes to enable or exclude light from reaching the film.

Shutter speed : Shutter speed is measured in seconds: 1/1000 s,1/500 s,1/250 s,1/125 s,1/60 s,1/30 s,1/15 s,1/8 s,1/4 s,1/2 s,1 s, 2 s, 3 s… etc.

Fig 1.4 Shutter speed

Example :

Fig 1.5 Examples of photo taken (Shutter speed)

ISO : Originally referred to film's sensitivity—its "light gathering" capability. The sensitivity—the signal gain—of the camera's sensor is referred to as ISO in digital photography.

The common ISO camera settings are: 100, 200, 400, 640, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400….
The lower the number of ISO the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain.

Fig 1.6 The value of using higher ISOs

There are just two camera settings which affect an image's "luminous exposure": shutter speed and aperture. The third parameter, camera ISO, affects the brightness of our images as well.

Fig 1.7 Different settings that affects the "luminous exposure"

Lens perspective

Wide angle lens

Wide angle lenses are ideal for fitting a large area into your frame.
A wide angle lens is very beneficial for landscape and street photography. Unless your subject is very near to the lens, practically everything is in focus with wide angle lenses.

Standard lens

In terms of visual angle and perspective, standard lenses provide a pretty realistic approximation of what the human eye perceives.
Images captured with a standard lens are believed to be more natural than images captured with other types of camera lenses.

Tele lens

great for isolating a subject that is far away.
It allows us to photograph subjects from a distance thanks to their magnification.

Appropriate lens provided desire framing, lens choice affects angle of view.

Fig 1.8 Different types of lens

Types of camera lenses

Different lenses are designed for different for different purposes. Lenses can be categorised by Focal length.

Fig 1.9 Types of camera lenses

Focal length : The shorter the focal length, the wider the angle of view and vice-versa.

Focal length is the measurement (in millimeters) from the optical center of a camera lens to the camera’s sensor.

Depth of field : The proportion of the image that is reasonably sharp and in focus.

The smaller the aperture you use, the greater the depth of field.

DSLR V.S. Smartphone

PROS

Familiar with device
Good quality
Easy to learn

CONS

Still limited
Good but not great
Non-ergonomic shape

Convenience vs Quality

DSLR cameras are made to take pictures. Phones are built to perform a wide range of functions.
The size of phone cameras is quite restricted. The size of the lens and the sensor that collects the images. The lenses and sensors on entry-level DSLRs are significantly bigger than those on mobile phones.

INSTRUCTIONS

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PRACTICAL

Week 1: Exercise 01

We were asked to choose three of our favourite graphic design composition works from Pinterest. Below are my chosen images and the descriptions on why I choose them.

Design 1 :

Fig 3.1 Favourite Design 1, Week 1

Description: Overall, the colour is very eye-catching as it only uses cool colours. As well as the graphics, it looks compelling. It was also designed stage by stage meaning that he designed the top part (land) to the surface of the sea and deep into the ocean. It has connections from the top to bottom as it expresses the land, ocean, nature and the buildings of the world we are living in now in a single poster to convey appreciation to nature.

Design 2 :

Fig 3.2 Favourite Design 2, Week 1

Description: This poster contains cute cartoons along with bright colours used in it such as pink, green, yellow and red and a clean neon green background for a stand out graphic. The fonts, design elements, mix and match of different colours shows how powerful the shoes are as it uses bold font along with smaller size font and a different font for the word ‘S’. The “Nike” logo is also being effectively used in this poster to emphasise or to highlight the branding.

Design 3 :

Fig 3.3 Favourite Design 3, Week 1

Description: At first glance, it looks like a spacious space/ galaxy surrounded by a huge spaceship. The colours, composition and the variety of shapes/ elements that are used also grabs my attention as it looks more stands out in a poster along with the use of it as overall to convey the messages to the people.

This artwork expressed:

" Dai Ba Bing Biang Kio '' is a non-stop Spaceship that spends its days and nights in Taipei, generating enthusiasm and love for the globe. It came at Les Arts Décoratifs in February 2017 to participate in the Graphic Design Festival Paris' Visual Taipei exhibition.

TuBo Lee, HuiYing Kao, Selina Tung, Mibo Lin, Yi Sheng Jian, Chien-An Chou

Week 3: Exercise 02 (The Bizier game)

We were given instructions by Mr Fauzi to use The Bézier Game website to practice using the pen tool in Photoshop. Below are my takes on the challenges.

Fig 3.4 Take 1

Fig 3.5 Take 2

Fig 3.6 Take 3

PROJECT

Project 1A: Physical Collage (Week 02)

Our next task was to start cutting out components from magazines or newspapers to make a collage. We were to create three separate pre-compositions before combining them into one final collage. Below are my three collage pre-compositions.

Pre-Composition #1

Fig 4.1 Composition #1

Pre-Composition #2

Fig 4.2 Composition #2

Pre-Composition #3

Fig 4.3 Composition #3

After submitting these 3 compositions. Mr Fauzi gave us some feedback during class and show some of the student's work so that we get some ideas for this project.

Feedback : You may choose Composition #1 as your final submission later on.

Project 1A: Digital Collage (Week 03)

Pre-Composition #1

Fig 4.4 Composition #1

Pre-Compositions #2

Fig 4.5 Composition #2

Pre-Compositions #3

Fig 4.6 Composition #3

Feedback : Good series of collage. You may choose Composition #3 for your final collage.

Project 1A: Digital Composition Review (Week 04)

Pen Tool Exercise (Best Composition from Week 03)

Fig 4.7 Best Composition from Week 03

DESCRIPTION:

In this week's exercise, we were to create 3 digital collages using images Mr Fauzi has provided to us. We were to cut / crop out images that we would like to include in our collage and therefore, pen tool, lasso tool and layering were introduced in this week’s lecture. Above is my third composition that I have created. The people walking is the main focus of this composition and I try to make it as simplistic as possible by adding texture backgrounds and upside down buildings at the opposite side.

Adjustment Layers & Filters (Week 04)

Fig 4.8 Adjustment layers and filters , Week 4

DESCRIPTION:

In this week's exercise, we were to utilise the best picked composition and improve the image by adjusting layers or adding filters to our chosen composition. It was a good chance for me to practice my editing abilities as well as to learn more of the tools of Photoshop. Mr. Fauzi picked my third piece of composition for this week's assignment, so I started exploring. The main colour that i used is mainly purple and pink in contrast with darker gray brown colour and play with the filters and gradient map and more in the adjustments layers.

Project 1B : Digital Imaging Exercise (Week 05)

Part 1 : Hearst Mansion (Shazam)

This week's assignment is to learn how to use Photoshop's rapid selection tools, layer masks, filters, and adjustment of colours. Mr. Fauzi had provided us with a video and a PowerPoint presentation on how to work on this project.

Steps :

To remove the background, use the Quick Selection tool.

Cropping - add & apply layer mask