People Letters Fun

With the help of two of my kids, we had a lot of fun making letter shapes to spell out Kids rule. The individual image is brought into the software and a copy is made. Using the eraser tool I removed large areas of the background first. Then using the magic lasso tool with various tolerances, I selected more to remove. I found I had to zoom in really close to then use the eraser at 2 pixels size to smooth up the ragged edges left behind. Each letter is copied and moved to a new file that started at 1" x 12". After I was finished adding letters, I cropped the image down to the length needed. With all the letters on transparent backgrounds, I can change the background image color at will.

Combining TYPE with photos

In reviewing the last chapter in the textbook we use, I got inspired with an image I saw. It is referred to as a character mask. It was impossible to get everyone in the class to show through in exactly what I wanted but this is my best effort today.

Students have a 3 day break. When we come back on Tuesday, we will tackle the final bit in Rhoda's text working with 3 last exercises. Reminder the WBP is due on May 30th. there is NO late credit for this assignment. School camera's, along with batteries and charger are due to be turned in next Thursday, the 29th. All student files will be erased from school computers by June 4th so start deciding how you are going to transfer your images to your own computer.

I almost have decided on the final exam. It will include written questions and a practical problem to complete in class.

Framed Photos Going Home

Even though the due date for the framed old time photo is not until tomorrow, I had several students get this done early. Some of them even used my suggestion of putting a dollar between the cardboard backing and brown paper dustcover forever. The idea is "..if I ever get poor enough, at least I know where a dollar is."

I introduced a class project today where we will spell out words with body shapes. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.

Animation I made in PhotoShop

Copyright Permission

I was very pleased to find in my inbox this morning, a reply from Rhoda Grossman granting me permission to use her images in my blog and teaching. The text we use is shown above, Fun with PhotoShop Elements 3 Foto-Fakery for Everyone. Her work is exciting and I encourage other Technology Teachers to use this book. An updated edition for version 4 of the software is also available. For more information about Rhoda you can visit her website www.digitalpainting.com I know I have!

The fool me product exercise

This exercise was to produce a fake product. I took a photo of a can of beans where I removed the label. I found the portable photo booth we have in class useful. With this, I used a photo I took of a nest of birds I found in my shed. It is an awful thing to think anyone in the world would actually "can" these beautiful creatures. Photo Shop allowed me to make it happen. After selecting part of the bird image I wanted, I cut and paste it into the can layer. The text was created on new blank files and simplified to rasterize the text. This allowed me to use Filter --> Distort--> Shear to curve the text similar to the can.

Encouraging Creativity

Even though this was a Friday and near the end of school, I am pressing for students to be creative. In the assignment for "Fooling me Twice" MY goal is to have everyone take the jump to come up with an idea for a product that is their own. I brought in several items from my home and set up the little light studio to pass along the idea. Yesterday afternoon I took a photo of items already in the classroom and changed a glue bottle into a 'Joy Juice bottle' and turned the germX bottle into 'Stomach Sanitizer' instead of hand sanitizer. I realize it takes time and effort to do things like this. This is WHY we meet. Come on kids, I want to be impressed! Do not use the basic can image from the exercise for your final.

Grading Rubric is Ready!

Please take the time to use the grading rubric yourself for your efforts on this web based portfolio. I wiil be glad to preview your work and give feedback before the deadline.

Look at My googlepages and it is posted there on the main page.... It is a spreadsheet.

Major Concern of Copyright Infringements

I have conflicting thoughts about what is best to do as an educator. I wanted this blog for students and parents to see quickly what we are doing in class. I think they benefit from seeing what the expectations are and this blog made it very easy to have clear, full color images available for viewing. I have posted images we used from the text, Fun with Photoshop Elements 3 Foto-Fakery for Everyone written by Rhoda Grossman. It is published by Sams Publishing. I just reread the copyright information in the front of the book and am emailing the publisher and author today to ask for guidance and permission to do what I am doing.

I will make any adjustments that I am asked to do.

Working with Rubric for WBP

I have spent the past two days working on a rubric for the Web Based Portfolio. I've asked for student feedback and received some ideas. It appears students do not wish to have as many points for spelling and grammar. Here are a few thoughts as to what I hope everyone will think through.

The WBP is needs to be professional in tone. I really do not wish to see any text where it says, "Mr. Vickers said I have to do this..., My teacher requires me to do..., In order to get a grade, I am making this blog...."

I want to see a fully developed section where at least one project is explained through images and test. Screen shots of the Photo Shop steps used and accurate descriptions as to how you accomplished what you did is included.

The About Me section is intended for future employers. I am NOT a fan of how the blog gets one to include what movies they like, etc. Make a separate post of entry with your About Me section please.

Example of a 'Learning Process'

Above you see my original image of the Park Entrance sign on my way home over the mountain every day. In the following posts, I'll describe how I used Adobe Photo Shop Elements v.3 to alter what the sign says and then add another image.

These posts are being completed to demonstrate what is required for my student's Web Based Portfolio (WBP). The assignment stated you must relate in words and images how you achieved the results for a final image. One of these projects must show detailed description of the processes used. We will work on a grading rubric in class this week to provide clear expectations.

First steps are the hardest

Deciding what to do is sometimes the hardest part of any design process. I choose to explain how one can change the words on a sign and to add another image for an overall composite one.

Open your original image in Photoshop and immediately make a copy of the background layer. One never works off of the original to give yourself a 'safety net' to fall back on when undesired things happen.

My plan is to change 'SHENANDOAH' to 'VICKERS' to make my own National Park. My first thought was to take some of the letters and paste them over the existing ones as you see below.


I then stretched the selected graphic without distortion by holding down the Shift key. You can see the handles on the selected image from where this was being done.

I worked around in this manner for a bit of time until realizing that it would be a lot of trouble to fill in the many spaces left over between the letters with an appropriate background. I switched my process by painting over the lettering I wished to change first. Use the eyedropper tool, it is the one to that is 4th one down on the left column of the tools, to select the exact background brown color. I then used the brush with setting of 100% opacity, darken mode and of a size I felt comfortable working with. My red line leads you to see the brush being used to paint over the existing words.

I was not real happy with the resulting background just yet. The letter outlines still shows so I decided to use the smudge tool to try and eliminate some of the offending lines. You can see my red outlined area where the tool has done it's work below:

Assembling my letters

The process I developed to get the letters I wanted was to use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select just what I wanted. You can see the marching ants around the letter R below. I went to Layer --> New --> Layer via Copy to get the image I needed to work with.

Every time I use editing software I seem to learn something new. I found it very beneficial to talk to others about what my challenges were in completing this assignment. Thanks to Tiffany I learned that I did not have to go through the time consuming task of taking a screen shot of the process, pasting it into a Word document, printing the page in color, scanning that document to create a jpeg file that could be uploaded to this blog. Her insight was to use the standard Paint program found in the accessories on all Windows based PCs. Below you can see the new empty Paint screen. This saved lots of time and effort!

The procedure I followed was while in Photo Shop I pressed Print Scrn Key (it is on the top row of keys to the right of F12) to save the image on the screen to the computer memory. Open the Paint program and Under the Edit menu choose Paste. Save this as a jpg You need to keep track of where you save all of the screen shot images to reduce confusion later when uploading to the web.

I found it the Polygonal Lasso Tool worked best for selecting the 'S,' I did not wish to have to deal with the lighter colors in the adjoining sign that would be picked up otherwise. Please note that as I added layers they show up on the right hand side. You may have noticed the layer names were changed from things like Layer 1 to what it actually contained. This is done by double clicking on the layer the name and typing in whatever you desire.

I did end up using my original 'VIC' selected layer and enlarging it to match the remaining letters. Once I had my letters arranged exactly like I wanted I Merged the layers down as You can see below.

Clean Up of lettering

Moving the text layer onto the blank line sign is the next step. I centered my name in the space .

Notice that I now have only one layer of text and it is labeled VICKERS which is what it contains. I then used the standard Eraser Tool (it is pointed out in red with an additional text box added with the paint program for visibility) to clean up between the letters. This is exacting work that required me to zoom in close and use a small (7 pixel) size brush.

This process goes on for quite a bit to make the letters as perfect as I could. I zoomed in and out changing the erase tool size as needed to obtain results I wanted. Details ( that I do not have images for) includes painting more white to make the end of the 'K' look like it should. Careful work in the details makes or breaks the final image in my opinion.

I had a layer of my son and me from another Photo Shop project and decided to include us in the composite image. I quickly realized I wish I had kept a layer of us on a transparent background. Anyway with a few more minutes of work, I could redo what I had done before. I just opened this image and using the Lasso tool, selected what I wanted. Then I used edit to copy this to the computer memory.

Going back to my sign image, I used the Move tool to place the graphic near the sign as you can see below.

Getting there!

Making sure the proper layer was highlighted (in this case Layer 2) I used the eraser tool to begin removing the white background. Quickly I realized I had placed ourselves too high up in relation to the rock pillar. I saw this in the placement of Joe's foot being off the ground. This is seen below:



I used the Move tool again to reposition ourselves further down in the grass. It took careful work of zooming in/out and changing eraser tool size to properly remove all of the white. I found I had to get to the 1 pixel size to really get results I wanted. Changing the opacity of the layer allowed me at times to see what I would have before erasing. I used the Ctrl Z shortcut to go back when I erased too much. Experience gets one to use the eraser tool in short bursts and not trying to erase too much at once. I saved time this way.

At some point I felt like I was done to the best of my ability. This is always a judgement call because I feel like more time spent could produce a better image. I think the law of diminishings returns comes in here.

Thinking of the composition rules of leading one's eye in a photo got me to crop the image to position the elements of the photo better. In the screen shot below you can see where I am ready to accept the cropped dimension.

Final Image

I saved the composite image as in several formats. The jpg file is a compressed version resulting in 3,740 KB, the TIF file without compression is 35,028KB and the PhotoShop file is a 28,979KB jpg file so I could print it. The opuput devices I normally use is an ink jet printer and printing a 4x6 glossy image with the approximate 3.7M file works fine. If the image was going to be printed larger I would use the TIF file for more clarity.

Back from Hampton, VA

I missed a day of classes Friday to take these kids to Hampton, VA for the state TSA contests. The kids won two trophies and many finalist pins. I was happy to find that my classes went well. The note I read was that the Imaging class is self directing and worked all period. It is good to see students becoming Successful, Independent Adults.

I got to judge the Imaging Technology contest and saw some great photographs with very professional looking displays. I hope to use this knowledge next year to encourage more RCHS students to improve their chances at contests.

Working on the WBP

I've spent a lot of time getting my own web based portfolio up. The students have 3 choices. They can: 1) burn a CD to turn in using their own equipment, 2)create a blog, or 3) create Google pages. The best alternative in my opinion is the Google pages since you nave much more control on where to place items and rearrange them. I have looked at blogs started awhile back and see the students making attempts to make it more like what the assignment is. The most important point I need to get across is that the WBP has to include processes learned and not just a series of artifacts created.

Take a moment to look at my Google page in the link to this blog. If you would like just click here... http://57rvick.googlepages.com/home