Portfolio Development

Hello Students,

Having a polished and professional looking portfolio is key to your success in finding work after High School and moving on to developing a career. Download the ROP Portfolio Handbook to use as a guide for creating your own portfolio, a requirement in all ROP classes.

Portfolio's are due by beginning of May and must be ready for presentation, evaluation and critique (make it perfect!) but that is no reason to slack on this project. You should put great time and care into creating the professional side of your portfolio and then you will be ready to add your creative projects as the semester progresses. You will complete a digital version as a PDF file for evaluation. Class winner will be able to print and prepare their portfolio for inclusion in the Portfolio Showcase competition. Everyone can print a copy to keep and report covers will be provided if possible.

Remember that the best portfolio in class will be sent to the portfolio design competition that ROP has at the end of each school year, your portfolio will compete against other graphic design classes across the county, and there are prizes!

A judge evaluates print portfolio's from past entrants...

Portfolio Cover Design Assignment:

• Design an eye catching cover design for you your portfolio
• Include your name, the title of this class, the school you are currently attending and the year
• Design your cover for standard letter size 8.5X11 inch paper
• When you are done post your portfolio cover design to your blog
• Cover design is due on wednesday (no class tuesday)

Portfolio Development Long Term Assignment:

• Your portfolio must be created in Indesign and the final file must be a multi-page PDF document
• Use the Pages palette to create multiple pages for your portfolio with Indesign
• Your portfolio cover, table of contents and all materials should look clean and consistent. Use consistent design style across all aspects of your portfolio, this includes color, typography, layout and style

Your Portfolio must contain in this order: See portfolio handbook for more details...

1. Cover page with your name, class title, year. Spend some time on this, it should show good design skill and be reflective of your personality
2. Table of contents
3. Letter of Introduction
4. Resume
5. Handwritten Job Application 
6. List of References
7. Letter of Recommendation -  cannot be from your ROP teacher or a family member
8. 3 or more work samples with written explanation about the work, why is it important to your career choice? What did the project entail, what were the challenges and difficulties? Give us details.

How Your Portfolio Is Evaluated:

• Contains required content and format
• Well organized
• Free of grammer problems
• ROP related work samples
• Shows creativity
• Nice appearance
• Shows skill development
• Appropriate for use in job search
• Professional appearance
• Nice presentation
• Shows good design and wise choice of color palettes
• Shows consistency across all pages
• Reflects your style, personality and interests

A print portfolio can take many forms, it can be professionally bound, stitched by hand or bound with a spiral ring... how will you create your portfolio, what will make it stand out above the rest?

Tips For Winning The Portfolio Competition:

In the last few years the portfolio competition has gotten fierce, especially for the graphic design category. Other schools have printing facilities that we don't, so you must use your creativity, ingenuity and eye for design to stand above the rest. Consider purchasing a large format portfolio binder and printing work samples at 11X17", or consider making a hand-bound book format to showcase your work. The limits are only contained by your creativity!

Use this as a rough guide to laying out your own portfolio...

Ok, have fun!

Previous Student Portfolio Cover Design Samples:

P.S. There are more samples on the back table for review...

Colorizing B&W Photography with Adobe Photoshop

Students, this project will strengthen your skills in photoshop, especially with the Selection Tools, Layers and Blending Modes, which are some of the most commonly used tools. Image manipulation is important for photo compositions, which are commonly used in print advertising.

Part 1: Download a black and white photo, or find a color photo and convert it to black and white with Photoshop. Feel free to use your own photography. You can also try websites like Shorpy.com for high resolution B&W images.

Part 2: In Photoshop there are several ways to colorize a photo. Here is the basic idea of the colorization process:

• Open your image in Photoshop and create a new blank Layer using the Layer Palette
• Set this new Layer's Blending Mode to "Darken"
• Take a Selection Tool, such as the Magic Wand Tool, Lasso Tool, or Magnetic Lasso Tool and select an area to colorize over your photo
• Fill this Selection with the color of your choice, the "Darken" Blending Mode will make this color mix with your original black and white photo
• You could also simply use a single layer with the blend mode set to darken, and paint the color on with the paintbrush tool. Turn the hardness setting up and use smaller brushes for detail
• It's up to you to decide the color scheme, you can use realistic colors, vibrant colors or try using a Tetradic or Quadrilateral color palette for experimental results
• Continue these processes until the entire photo has been colorized
• Due tuesday!

Have fun!

- Mr.Wilson

New Assignment: 3 Flavors of Image Enhancement

Hello Students,

For this assignment you will take your favorite landscape and 2 portraits from your recent portrait projects and create 3 different post-processed versions of each of the images. The 3 techniques are cross-processing, tilt-shift and the Dragan effect, named for Andrzej Dragan.

Portrait Post Processing Assignment:

Pick 2 of your favorite portraits you have taken and create a version with the cross process effect and one with the dragan effect. Choose one of your landscape images or take a new image to use with the tilt-shift effect. Follow the links below and use the tutorials to complete your images. Post each of them with titles to your blog when complete.

Cross-Processing:

Cross processing is an effect where the film is developed with the wrong mix of chemicals. Work through the tutorial to recreate this effect and make your photo look like it's source was film and not digital. The border around the film is called the "film rebate". Search for one on google images to use on yours.

Tilt-Shift:

Tilt shift photography is a technique where the lens angle is changed to create a focused center area. This tricks the brain into thinking it is seeing something very small. This is the effect we see when we squint our eyes at a small object.

Dragan Effect:

Andrzej Dragan's photography is known for having an intensity in detail and tonal depth. Try to mimic his technique with photoshop by working through the video tutorial.

Prefer a plain tutorial? Check out this link: Dragan Effect in 5 steps

Double Exposure and Multiple Exposure Photography

Hello Students,

For your final you will be exercising two artistic photography techniques, double exposure and multiple exposure.

Assignment Requirements:

• Create a double exposure image or portrait
• Create a multiple exposure image or portrait. Must contain at least 4 exposures/images combined into 1
• Due Friday

What is Double Exposure?

Double exposure with a traditional film camera involved exposing 2 different images to 1 piece of film. The effect creates an overlay of 2 images into 1, the areas of dark and light combine. With digital camera's we can take 2 different photos and combine them into 1 by using Photoshop's layers. See examples below:

Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, double exposure made using a film camera, 1980 by Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons 

Double exposure made using a film camera

What is Multiple Exposure?

Multiple exposure is when a camera is timed to take an exposure at different intervals of time, creating a series of images into 1 image. With a digital camera we can take multiple images and combine them with photoshops layers and some clever use of the Eraser Tool. See examples below:

A multiple exposure image created with photoshop

A multiple exposure composite image of a lunar eclipse taken over Hayward, California in 2004.

Artistic Double Exposure Portraits

When you pay attention to the light and dark areas you can have some amazing results with double exposure. Photoshop lets us combine and erase and change the way our layers blend together. Try to achieve an artistic effect. Can you figure out how the images below were created? The examples below were created by the artist Dan Mountford.

Student Work Samples: Double and Multiple Exposures

HDR Pro Project

Hello Students,

Your new assignment is to shoot a set of bracketed exposure images and combine them with Photoshop's "Merge to HDR Pro" feature. HDR Pro is a powerful tone mapping program, and is the best way to merge multi-exposure images.

Project Requirements:

• You will produce 4 final images for this project.

• You must use a tripod to shoot a set of multiple exposure images. and then combine them with the Merge to HDR Pro feature in photoshop. Take 3 different exposures, underexposed, normal and overexposed. Team up since we only have a few tripods.

• Write down the shutter speed, aperture and ISO for each image you take, HDR Pro may need this information. You can look it up in your EXIF data as well. Use the inspector in the Preview program to see the data.

• For your first image you will merge the separate exposures and use the sliders in the HDR Pro interface to achieve your best desired look.

• For the other 3 images, reload your separate exposures in HDR Pro and choose your 3 favorite Presets from the Preset Menu.

• Upload your 4 final images as jpgs to your blog when complete.

Tips and Advice to get great results:

• Subject matter is your choice, but avoid any portraits or any subject that will move between taking each picture. 
• HDRI process works best with landscapes, cars, architecture and objects that have rich texture or very shiny surfaces, like cars. 
• HDR Pro can align your images, but if there is too much movement between exposures than results can be less than desirable. 
• Use a tripod, it is mandatory for this project!
• If you want to use this for portraiture, make sure your subject can hold themselves extremely still between shots... otherwise there will be ghosting and blur in your image.

How To Merge with HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5:

AKA: Tone Mapping

• Take your 3 different exposures and place them in a new project folder
• Launch Photoshop and go File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro
• Browse to your files and load all 3

• Merge to HDR Pro launches
• Input the Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO for each exposure

• Modify the sliders as outlined below to achieve your best look
• Check out the Presets at the top for your other 3 versions

Check out this video about using HDR Pro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsaS5vgzlek

Setting Camera Up for Bracketing:

Menu > Camera  >Bracketing > AE Bracketing > Choose exposure

Click here to check out this link to see details on setting up AEB on the Rebel T3i

Merge to HDR Pro Slider Functions Explained:

Edge Glow:

Strength <--- Increase these numbers for more halo effect, decrease for less

Radius <--- Increase these numbers for more halo effect, decrease for less

Tone/ Detail

Detail <--- Sharpens your image and adds contrast, ADJUST THIS FIRST then adjust others.

Exposure <--- Increases or decreases brightness

Shadow <--- brighten or darken shadows

Highlights <--- brighten or darken highlights

Color:

Vibrance  <--- Adjusts muted colors first, then others

Saturation <--- removes or adds more color

Introduction to High Dynamic Range Imagery (HDRI)

Hello Students,

Your next assignment is to create 3 "mock" HDRI Images with photoshop. Follow my process below very carefully for success. Check out this  link of cool HDRI Images for inspiration.

 

Project Requirements:

• Shoot 3 new photographs using a DSLR, your images should be high resolution. The more image data the better. The subject matter is your choice, landscape, portrait etc. Choose images that have good color variation and are properly exposed and in focus.

• Process each image with the steps below, post a before and after version for each image to your blog upon completion.

Simplified HDRI Process with Photoshop:

You can make a "mock" HDRI image from a single photograph with photoshop. Normally creating an HDRI image requires multiple exposures. We will try creating one with a single exposure. The results should add a big color boost to our photographs.

Step 1) Open your image in photoshop. Rename your background layer to "Original".

Step 2) Create a duplicate layer and rename it "black&white". Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue and Saturation. Pull the saturation down until your image loses all color. Now change the Blending Mode to Overlay. This is located on your Layer Palette.

Step 3) We need to "invert" or reverse the "black&white" layer. Go to Image > Adjustments > Invert.

Step 4) Now we add some blur for that airbrushed look. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. I used a Blur setting of about 40, if your photograph is lower resolution than our classroom DSLR you may need to adjust this number. Adjust till you achieve the desired look.

Step 5) Now duplicate your "Original" Layer and place it above all other layers. Rename this layer "Linear" and change the Blending Mode to Linear Light. Lower this layer's opacity to about 60, or adjust to your desired level.

That's it your done! Repeat this process with 2 more images and place a before and after version for each image on your blog.

 -  Mr.W