photo project draft

here's my draft for the photo editing project:

here's my draft of the report portion of the photo editing project:

Audience/Purpose: describe the intended audience of your photo edited image(s); what are you trying to communicate to this audience?

The intended audience of my photo edited images is young adults in the age range of 18 to 25, whether the are currently in college or not. My main purpose with these edited images is to encourage and inspire young individuals to get outside and explore the world. Assuming that these individuals have at least a small amount of "extra" spending income, I want to show that you can go to amazing places while still having a smaller budget. One of the ways I represented this through this photo editing project was by selecting cities that are less touristy and traveled to, therefore they may not be as expensive to visit. Also by sharing the beauty of these places I bring attention to cities that young people may have not even heard of since they most likely don't have prior traveling experience. As someone who fortunately grew up traveling a bit with my family, I want others my age to feel empowered to go out and experience the many beautiful places the world has to offer and hopefully learn and appreciate other cultures and perspectives. My hope is that these photo edited images would catch the attention of young individuals who have at least the smallest inkling or desire to travel and motivate them to just go out there and do it.

Image(s): how do features of the image(s) effectively convey the message to your audience?

One of the main features of the images that I have created is a layering effect. Personally I think this effect is eye-catching because it almost causes you to do a double-take and consider whether or not the image is real or a compilation of multiple pictures. By doing this hopefully someone would stop and take a closer look at the full image to understand the purpose behind it. In my photo edited images I chose to layer images of key monuments or destinations in that city or country. This conveys my message that there are undiscovered places out there with natural beauty. By showing these interesting images hopefully my audience would be inspired to research more about this place and maybe even visit there. I also decided to create a "swirly" font, as well as include a sort of slogan for the travel destination in order to catch the attention of a younger audience. I know that film and vintage inspired images are very popular with younger audiences these days, so I decided to add grain to the images so it would almost even look like an old postcard or film picture.

Process: what did you do to create the photo edited image(s) in this project?

To create these photo edited images I first started off with a background image from the city (or country). I attempted to choose an image that had some solid colored space so that way I had room on the edited image to include other layered images. Next I found images of different monuments and buildings, which I then cut out using Photoshop's many selecting tools like the Magic Wand. I created layers from these images and then placed them in various areas of the image. Next I added a grain filter to all the images to add the desired effect I mentioned prior. Finally I placed around with texts and fonts and added the name of the country as well as a catchy saying, so that there would be a textual message displayed on my images.

Learning: what did you learn from working on this project–for example, about Photoshop, about design, about communication, about yourself?

About design in specific I learned to "criticize" and be skeptical of my own work. What I mean by this is that sometimes I have a vision in mind for a project, but once I execute it in Photoshop I assume it's the best it can be. I think I get a little lazy and instead I should be asking myself if I actually like all the design choices I made. I've learned that it's important to always have reasoning behind design decisions, whether that be the placement of an image or the color of text. In regards to Photoshop I definitely got a lot more comfortable cropping and selecting images with Photoshop's tools, such as the Magic Wand and Object Select. I utilized these a lot because I cropped parts of images and then overlayed them on top of each other. I also learned more about filter and text effects, such as shadowing and outlining. Something I learned about myself through working on this project is that just because I might be creative in some aspects, it doesn't mean I'm going to be naturally good at Photoshop and editing photos in general. It's important for me to understand that creating graphical designs takes a lot of time and practice. It will also take me a long time to discover my preferences when it comes to design and ultimately create my own sort of "theme" or "brand".

Next: what will you do the same/differently on the next project?

On the next project I think I would like to spend more time creating my vision and plan before just going straight into creating it. I've realized how important it is to have reasoning behind each design choice and ensuring that it always relates back to my message and purpose. By having a strong established purpose and goal for the project I can always have a place to go back to when actually working on creating it. I would also like to get more feedback and advice while working on my next project because it's hard to only have one set of eyes looking at something. It's important that I make sure my audience and not only myself will enjoy what I create. Something I will do the same for the next project is learning from online tutorials. In this last project, tutorials were very helpful because they not only taught me new concepts in Photoshop, but they also gave me inspiration on what to include in my actual project. By learning new techniques I have more to work with when it comes to designing the project and making it unique.