Computer Literacy and Numeracy Module

Photoshop Exercise

Image 1:
[pic]

This graphic (Image 1) displays how the citizens of Urbania are attempting to pass their garbage problems onto other smaller municipalities. Specifically, this image shows a citizen of Urbania sweeping his garbage “under the rug” of the rural towns in a very care free manner. The citizen himself is extremely large compared to the rural areas; this symbolizes the helplessness of the smaller rural towns to stop the big city.

This graphic was created using a combination of several borrowed images and free-hand computer drawn pictures.

I borrowed the image of the man from a website on the internet. He was originally black and white, using both arms to sweep and facing the opposite direction (See Image 2).

Image 2:
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Using Paint Shop Pro I erased the litter and one of his arms. I then selected and copied his remaining arm, pasted it and rotated it into the upward position. I then coloured the image and horizontally mirrored it.

Next I hand drew the hills of Ruralia, the trees and the houses. I further created the cities sign and rotated the text “RURALIA” to match the angle of the sign.

I then found a picture of the Dallas, Texas skyline (Image 3), which was chosen for its lack of defining features, and opened it in Photoshop.

Image 3:
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I used the crop tool to select the portion of the image I wanted to use and then used the artistic filter “Cutout” on the image. In the options section of the filter I selected 8 Levels of detail and 0 for Edge Simplicity. This created a cartoon-like image.

Next I used the eyedropper tool and selected the green around the highway sign. I then selected the rectangle tool and made a larger rectangle around the sign, selecting the green colour as both the fill and outline colour. After that I selected white as my colour and selected the text tool and typed “Urbania” and positioned the text over the sign. I then selected the text and used the blur filter to reduce the sharp look of the text.

I then created a new blank image with fairly large dimensions. I copied my skyline image and pasted it into the new blank image. I then did the same for my citizen/town image. Next I found a picture of a garbage dump from the internet (Image 4) and opened it in Photoshop.

Image 4:

[pic]

I then used the stamp tool, and using the garbage in Image 4 as my source file, I drew the garbage into the hills of rural town.

Now that I knew how much space my new image was going to take up, I selected just the image portion on the canvas and cropped it, to remove excess blank space.

My next step was to use the eyedropper to determine the exact colour of the light blue sky in the now altered Dallas image. I then took the paint bucket and filled in any remaining white space with this blue sky colour. To finish the image I again used the eyedropper to determine the colour of the darker sky in the Dallas image and then used the brush tool to add accenting colour above Ruralia.

Finally I saved the image as a jpeg, opened a blank Microsoft Word document and went to insert-picture from file and selected my newly created jpeg image.