Liisa's Blog: Week 6: March 8-12

This week in photoshop we worked with the selection tool, and playing around with hues, saturations, converting to black and white, and spot colouring. Spot colouring is when one (or more) items of the photo in question are left as colour and the rest is converted to black and white. We also converted a photo to black and white. This is done in photoshop by going Enhance>Adjust Colour>Convert to Black and White. We also learned to apply a blur or other effect to a background to make the background plainer, and the subject more prominent. All of these can be done with the selection tool, and then (sometimes after inverting the selection) in Enhance, changing whatever was needed to, or going to Filter and applying a fun effect. Lucky for me, I learned how to do this a few years ago in Comm Tech, so it came to me easily.

This Thursday we had a representative from Friesens to give us a presentation on a proper yearbook layout. She did have some interesting things to say-- and some things that contradicted what we learned in class. I found that in a lot of what she was saying, she was generalizing and stereotyping; for example she assumed all of us were unable of taking a good picture, and assumed that we had no concept of design or layout. Its unfair of her to say that about EVERYONE, she could have said that "some people aren't able take professional photos" instead of "students aren't capable of taking good photos for yearbooks". But this is me, venting. I also found that she liked white space and plain backgrounds waaaaaaaay too much. White space is good for some things, but as she said we could get into a debate about it. I also disagree with her on a few other things. She seemed to think that students like white space, and that students like large body copies- like newspapers. The reality of that is that students do NOT like body-copies at all. Photos-yes. Informative captions-yes. Titles-yes. Body copies-no.

The unfortunate truth is that students these days are getting lazier, and would prefer to have a yearbook as more of a photo-album than a magasine. At the beginning of this year, when the 2008-2009 yearbooks were released, I went around asking many students what they liked or didn't like about the yearbook, and what we could change. Another thing that I found when asking students what they wanted out of a yearbook (besides the above- relating to body copies), was that they found last year there were WAY too many sports pages, and not enough pages for individual clubs. They are smaller clubs because they don't have publicity from things such as yearbooks along with other things. Some people were upset because their club didn't have a group picture-- so we should do our best to get those photos taken.

This week we also had a photo-tip of the week. Our tip this week was "Use a Plain Background". Please see the post labelled "Photography Tips!" for more information relating to that.

March break is just around the corner, and tomorrow there is no class. Can't wait to go to Ottawa to check out the University of Ottawa, and to see my grandparents in Toronto. I leave Wednesday!!!