Unit 35

Technically adjusting images serves many different purposes. Whether you want to improve the ratio, resolution, quality or even just colour you can easily do so using Photoshop. Its important to know how image editing works and what your projected outcome is with the image. There are two different colour modes; RGB and CMYK.

A lot of monitors, screens and computer screens tend to be RGB and is considered the standard. RGB stands for Red Green Blue and when mixed can make over 16 million different colour combinations. All the colours have a value of 255, which when adjusted, will change the colour slightly.

On the other hand you have CMYK, which is used mainly in large scale printing. It is made up of 4 colours; Cyan Magenta Yellow and Key (Black). When placed onto of each other help process together different colours. If you designed something using RGB, then it was printed onto CMYK, it would not look the same and colours would be different once printed.

If you find some of your pictures are blurry or pixelated, you may be using bad images, this is because they are bitmap. To avoid this make sure all the images you use are both copyright free and large scale. As you can decrease the size of an image and it will not loose effect, but in reverse, if you try to make a small image larger it will struggle to find the pixels and look pixelated.

There are images called Vector Images, which can be pulled apart, resized and edited without loosing quality over time. The pixels do not stretch in vector images therefore they can be resized without having to worry about quality loss. Ideally, all of your images would be vector, this is why a lot of designers use illustrator which is a vector based program, where as photoshop is not.

Image editing is important, you can give a photo or image more life by undergoing some minor changes to the picture. For example, you can increase/decrease contrast and brightness, this could make the image look better if there is bad lighting or shadows. You could also edit the colour mode, change some of the colours to make them stronger or more vibrant. Or you could just simply sharpen the image to make it more dense and clear.

If you would like a transparent image, for example, something you can lie on top of another image so they look layered. You would first have to remove the background, which can be done by using the lasso tool and going around the edges and removing the background. Alternatively you could just highly the background and remove it but this tends to have a jittery outline. Once cut out, all you have to do is save the image as a transparent friendly file type such as .GIF or .PNG then place it where you want it to go.

Make sure you do not violate copyright laws when using images. A lot of companies or businesses like to make sure their own images, are their own, and will not be reused. To do this they copyright their images and if you use them without their permission it could potentially violate copyright laws and may be taken to court. To avoid this, make sure you use copyright free images or source your own images, instead of others.