Digital Enhancements

For the Digital Enhancements project, I chose to touch up (which ultimately lead to me nearly redoing) my poster submission about paper-waste/deforestation from module three. Without trying to sound conceited, and while still retaining humility, I really feel both my Disco Robots and my Dune cover are excellent pieces and I wouldn’t even know how to make them any better.  My poster, though, wasn’t anything special in my mind (even though I don’t hate it, I just don’t love it), and I figured I could try to work some of the new skills learned out of the book to make it better.

 

The original piece.

As you can see from my re-posting of mod 3’s poster, the background is pretty plain. The composition is all right, but the piece certainly doesn’t grab your (the audience’s) attention. Even though it has a message, it seems easy enough to brush it aside as the piece isn’t gripping.

Last time, I grabbed all of my images using google image search.  Since I had such great luck using the image search in NASA’s sites for space related pictures for last module, this time, for the environment, I turned to nationalgeographic.com.
So I got rid of all of the previous pictures. In fact, I only wound up keeping the memo-tree (that I discussed making in the mod 3 blog, which used a rudimentary form of the smart object layers we learned about, before learning about them), and the vertical style of the poster. I changed everything else.

I got a very poignant, more gripping photo of deforestation from nation geographic here: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/rainforest-deforestation/#/pantanal-deforestation_332_600x450.jpg -- I used that as the main image. Since there were sparse trees in a cut down radius, I thought to use arrows and text to link ‘office paper usage’ to the missing trees, tying it together and really pulling the viewer, the intended audience of office workers, into the situation. The last poster was more ‘polite’ about getting the point across, I wanted this, while still nonthreatening, more in-your-face-here-are-the-consequences than the last poster. I took the image from the site, used some autolevels, and then added a layer fx of stroke.

Next, I found the arrow picture to use: http://www.n3uea.com/geocaching/pics/otherpics/huge-right-arrow.gif, and rotated it, shrunk it, duplicated the layer 4 times, and applied an fx stroke to all of them.

Next I chose Book Antiqua as a font, and applied a small and light fx-stroke and fx-outerglow to help them standout against the image., and put in the ‘messages’ about the empty trees. Then I copied over the ‘memo-tree’ (with an altered drop shadow from the original) from the original poster to the new version. I added the second box for text, added a stroke to it, and then used Tahoma font with its own stroke for the other text. Then I used scale to fit it in the box.

For the background, I grabbed a picture of Redwood trees: http://craftsmandoorcompany.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/Redwood_Tree.118235945_large.jpg. I put that on one layer, and the duplicated the layer. The first layer I changed to opacity 37%. The second layer became a smart object, and I used ‘photocopy’ style filter on it, and then changed that opacity to 67%. Then I used the pencil tool to make a border around all that.

I feel like the message is better spelled out, the composition is more professional, and now this and the book cover and photomontage are all portfolio ready.

 

The finished redo.