DEVELOPMENT DIARY

The background image we used for the final poster is an original image taken at a local forest (Hatfield Forest). It will be heavily edited on Photoshop to give the illusion of a night

sky. Firstly, we changed the resolution of the image to 300 and the image size to 20cm x 13.34cm. Using the ‘Selective Colour tool, we picked ‘Neutrals’ from the drop down menu and altered the colouring so that it was now a purplish night-sky colour. We also edited the blacks so that they were more opaque and silhouette-like. We then used the Burn Tool to blacken the corners of the image to make room for stars. Using a ‘star’ brush that we down-loaded from the internet, we then randomly ‘painted’ different sized ‘stars’ onto the black parts of the image on a new layer. We first used a white brush, then we also added ‘cosmic’ colours such as pastel pink and pastel orange. We also used the ‘star’ brush in light blue to fade in the other colours used in order to create a more realistic night sky. We then decided that the right side of the image was a little empty and we wanted it to be balanced. We were also thinking about making the image portrait, so we needed a main focal point at the time. We wanted to use a night time image because most of our shooting for the video is going to be at night. The music that we are using could also be described as rather ‘dreamy,’ which we feel correlates with the atmo-spheric nature of the image we are us-ing. Using the Magic Wand tool, we selected the

DEVELOPMENT DIARY

tree that we intended to use. We then dragged it onto the main image and erased any ex-tra ‘foliage’ using the Eraser Tool that wasn’t part of the tree, and then changed its size us-ing the Free Transform Tool. We then placed it in the appropriate place. The finishing touches were minor edits such as the erasing of stars that had overlapped the black sil-houettes of trees using the Eraser Tool.

After a while of looking at this image, we felt that the colours didn’t represent the artist that we’re using. Although purple is often a mystical colour, the oranges bring out the warmth in the music. We felt that the original version of the image looked more realistic than we wanted and we wanted to make the dream-like qualities stand out and we felt that orange and pink tones did this. These colours would also appeal to the audi-ence as the original colours could be seen as negative. To change the colours we used the Selective Colour tool. Once the we had the orange and pink tones incorporated in the im-

DEVELOPMENT DIARY

age we felt that more ‘stars’ needed to be added, although they stood out and looked to forced. We decided to change the opacity of the ‘stars’ slightly. Once this was done we felt that the tree we had placed in the before image looked out of place and took away from the ‘feel’ of the image. Using the Free Trans-form Tool we made the tree smaller and placed it to the side of the image. We decided to add a unique logo for the piece, we thought using the colours we had on the black of the picture was a good idea. To make this logo we decided to use Image within Text. We opened a new psd, and transferred the final image on to it and du-

plicated the layer. We then added a white layer be-tween the two and the triangle text just above it. Then, we created a clipping mask of the top image thus allowing the top image to appear within the tri-angle text. We then dragged our new logo onto our original image and placed it in the corner. We knew we wanted to use the large triangle shape, and in-

corporating the main image ties the whole poster to-gether. We then added text. We chose this font be-cause whilst we were conducting our research, we found that a slim and tall font appeared most pro-fessional. It is easy to read and the text is quite fu-turistic which fits with the theme of fantasy. As our poster is landscape, it can also be displayed in

magazines as a double page spread or on billboards to reach a larger target audience.