In this lesson, we experimented with photoshop to gain further inspiration to improve or alter our mock-up, as well as gain experience in using this new technology. We were given the task of taking a picture that was deliberately taken from the internet because of it's poor quality, and turn it into a decent digipak.
Above is a picture of the digipak I created in the task. The problems I had with my image is that it was very small and pixelated to begin with, so when I opened it up into photoshop and resized it, it was very blurry. I learnt from this, that when working on my real digipak, I must make sure that the picture I use is already the same or of similar size to the panels I am using it on. I tried to improve on the blurriness by adding smoothing filters and de-saturating the image. Although this did not greatly improve the quality of the image, I realised that de-saturating an image does help it to blend in with it's surroundings, and thus this gave me the idea that I could experiment with desaturation on my final piece. This task also gave me the experience of using the tools in photoshop to remove the background, as this is one of the processes that I need to go through in order to merge my images. I learned that removing colourful backgrounds is a lot harder, as it is more obvious that the image has been removed, and you have to be very careful when tracing around things like hair, because photoshop sometimes confuses this with the background when using tools such as magic eraser. I chose this image out of the other possible "bad images", because it was the closest replica to the image I hope to achieve, due to the fact that it is an extreme close-up of a face.
I practiced the overlay technique and changing the opacity on the back panel of the digipak. To achieve this on my final piece, I must make sure the layers are arranged in the correct order, because this will impact which layers will be clearer and if in the wrong order, it will make erasing unwanted features difficult. I also placed the copyright information, barcode and logos in the places where I hope to put this information on my actual digipak.
From designing the inside of this digipack, I decided that I liked the fact of creating synergy, by putting the design of the back of the digipak on to the CD, as well as the artist's name. I put the name through the CD to make the hole look more realistic and also used a plastic wrap filter to make the section before the hole look more authentic. However I thought that an ordinary background behind the CD looked very plain.
This task also allowed me to think of features to express the meaning of the album name. For example, the album is called "Lost in Translation", thus I used the ghost underground tube map of London to both signify travelling and being lost, and as these station are no longer in use, they are lost from the world. I also made the same image on the front cover look burnt and faded on the inside to signify that he is being lost.
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