ITQ

Artwork & Imaging Software

The Studyzone

Introduction

Criteria

Assignments

Notes

Useful links

Notes

The Oaks Hotel & Restaurant

In the first stage you need photos or graphics to illustrate each of the slides: the hotel, the restaurant and its facilities generally. In an extension to the task you need to find suitable photos of each of the different facilities too.

Something I like

The images for this task are likely to be just those that you collect relating to your topic.As you will showing these on a large screen they need to be effective and grab people's attention and big enough to show good quality too.

Vegetables

The use of large images to fill a screen can be very effective, making a boring subject seem more attractive. Find good images that are suitable and use colour changes to highlight each of the four colours presented. .

Photo Album

For tasks like the Vegetables one or the Kardamena trip and the Oaks hotel facilities, as well as others perhaps, you will be collecting quite a few photos and presenting them both as small images and large ones. The finished product will be like a web site where you click on a small image to see it in more detail.

Business Stationery: cards, letterhead and brochure cover

In this task you will create your own graphics, using artwork and photos together with some text. The size of the logos will be quite small for a bisiness card but much larger for, say, a letterhead or a brochure cover. You will, therefore, produce large images and then see how they look when reduced in size. No doubt some changes will be necessary to first designs! You will also be working with making text look attractive and yet remaining legible.

Destination: Kardamena!

In this wide-ranging task, you will plan a trip to a Greek island and use photos and design work to display information about your journey and what you see on the way.

Important things to remember about images

Big pictures usually mean big files! A digital camera today will take high quality pictures with a file size of several megabytes. Image sizes of over 3000 pixels wide or deep are also common nowadays. Unless you are cropping a part of it, you probably only need about 1000 pixels width for most screen displays. So, reduce the physical dimensions with software like Serif PhotoPlus and then use the software to reduce the quality of the image.

Photos can be in jpg or png format. Jpg files are usually smaller than png ones but only png files allow part of the image to be transparent to allow you to have an irregular shape photo.

The other file type you'll use is gif which is good for graphics that only have a few colours - and this format also allows for transparency.

Always save an original and work ina copy of it!

You probably don't have permission to use an image created by someone else. If you need a photo of something, try Stock Exchange, FreeFoto or Morguefile where people allow their work to be used in non-commercial productions (and some in commercial work too). If you do want to use something where it's not clear whether you can then try writing to the owner. It may be difficult as not many people tell you much about their images but if it's on a web site the web site contact address is a good place to start.

© Andrew Hill Astcote UK page updated 10 March, 2010