Magazine Cover – Flyer – Advertisement in Paint.NET

I am having so much fun with learning these new technologies and getting more familiar with paint.NET. This blog post will show my magazine cover. I initially started out with my cat’s photo to practice with and make a cat magazine but when I was done practicing, I noticed a misspelled word, and I was running out of time, so I just stayed with the cat magazine theme and started all over. The bad thing about Paint.NET is that if you make a mistake in one area, such as misspelling a word and want to go back to it, you can’t! You will erase everything you did after you get to that one area you go back to in your history, so it is good to work in layers which is what I did the second time. Magazine2. Here is a link to my magazine cover. And yes, that is my cat, Somer-short for Somersault-on the cover. It may be hard to tell, but she is a tad bit overweight. At least that is what the Vet always tells me.

Below is a 11X17 flyer I made for PWR-350 in Adobe Illustrator. I traced Google images of the horseshoe, the shamrock, and the hat. The rest I used Adobe Illustrator to color the background and give it a light-dark image. Trying the get the letters to write on a curve was hard, but it is getting easier. I LOVE THIS STUFF!!!!!

I also learned how to export an AI (Adobe Illustrator) image to a JPG.

AI to JPEG YOUTUBE video

I also made a flyer for my PWR 350 class and I want to save it to my BAGTHEWEB.com site, but…well…I don’t know yet how to do that. In the meantime, I am going to load it here.

I did this in Adobe Illustrator for the “Share Your Story” night at the Hett.

I don’t fully understand why some attachments are so difficult to maneuver, but the above flyer or maybe it is to the right, I don’t know because when I type this message it is above, but when I update it, it moves it to wherever! Frustrating! (I’m referring to the purple flyer with the silhouettes).

I also did an advertisement for a golf tournament coming up. I would like to use other sites, such as Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Photoshop, but I am not as familiar with them as I would like to be, so this flyer above was done in Paint.NET.

Why this downloaded so easily versus the other one, is beyond me. Go figure!

Anyway, I hope you like it.

Paint.NET

I love learning new technologies! I am a non-traditional college student, (basically I’m old, I’m almost 50) and I grew up with the latest technologies being beepers and maybe getting access to a computer if I go to a library. So now that I am in college, I am so excited about learning new online technology, such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Publisher, but the latest is Paint.NET. If you are thinking, Wow! What rock did you just crawl out from? Well…that thinking is very accurate. In many of my classes, most students have already had exposed to some, in not years of this type of technology. I am familiar with most Microsoft software, but Adobe is new to me as well as Paint.NET. I had the great pleasure of messing around with Paint.NET and an in-class assignment I recently had to do was to take a photo and download it into Paint.NET and change it using what I learned in Paint.NET. The assignment was to pretend I am a photographer hired to produce a photo to use on an upcoming post-card intended for prospective students. This ‘pretend’ University, which is actually McKendree University where I attend, has asked me to submit a photo of the campus that best represents the University. Specifics on the assignment are as follows:

• Why I choose this photo
• Use of photography fundamentals (i.e. the Rule of Thirds)
• Your thought process behind the finished photo
• Defend your file type submitted

Here is a picture of my original photo: And here is my updated photo:

My reasoning for changing the photo so artistically is because I wanted the photo to be creative and capture the viewer’s attention. I used the Rule-of-Third’s top two anchor points as markers. I wanted the photo to be large in the postcard, so I knew I was going to use at least two anchor points. In Paint.NET, I used sepia to give it a historic feel as this University is actually the oldest one in Illinois. I chose the library image because the core values of this university are, Responsible Leadership, Engagement, Academic Excellence, and Lifelong Learning and where do you attain all these values on a campus in one setting? The Library! The structure is a magnificent prominent structure as well. I added zoom blur to focus in on the library, but blur the outer components, and I used posturize to separate colors, such as the clouds and the snow. I used saturation to give it the mystical feel and to add more of the universities color, which is purple. More to my reason for making this photo so eye-catching is when prospective students receive this card, it will have the University’s website and the prospective student will surely look up the website and see photo after photo of sharp, focused, absolutely perfect images of life on this campus. My thinking was that I wanted to capture the viewer’s attention. I believe I did. 🙂

PHOTOGRAPHY

A lesson on Photography:

Anna from creativebent.net visited our JRN-372 class and showed us the many features of her camera. She went into detail about aperture, shutter, and ISO.

Aperture is basically the size of the lens opening that controls the brightness of the light that reaches the sensor of film, kind of like our pupil of our eye. Our pupil enlarges or contracts to admit more light or less light. Aperture size is indicated by the f-number or f-stops. For this blog, I will use f-stops. Although I don’t know the full range of f-stops that can be utilized, the range Anna referred to was between f/1.4 to f/16.

The smaller f/1.4 f-stop means with the smaller f-stop, the larger the lens opening and vice versa, the larger, f/16 f-stop, the smaller the lens opening. See image below for an example.

And here are three photos below with three f-stop lenses in different ranges, so you can get an idea of what the aperture does.

Shutter Speed and Aperture work together and is hard to explain without a photo to show how they affect each a photo, but shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter is open to control the amount of light that reaches the light-sensitive surface. Both shutter speed and aperture affect sharpness. Shutter speed affects the sharpness of moving objects; aperture affects depth of field–sharpness from near to far. Here is an examples of shutter speed ranges, but it is not all-inclusive: 1 sec, 1/2 sec, 1/4 sec, 1/8 sec, 1/15 sec, 1/30 sec, 1/60 sec, 1/125 sec  and can go on as far as 1/8000 sec. So, basically, the faster the shutter speed, the sharper a moving object will be. The below image shows how the 1/160 sec photo is much sharper than the 1/3 sec photo.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the measure of the digital camera’s sensor’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO number (faster the film), the less light required to produce an image, so use a 400 to 1600 speed indoors and use the room’s existing light, but use a lower ISO range, such as 50-200 for brightly lit outdoor scenes. Different speeds help get the best photo for each situation. Faster speed films lave lower resolution and show less detail; meaning they produce grainier pictures. With a lower ISO (slow film), the finer the grain structure and the smoother and more detailed the image.

The left photo is a low ISO and the right is a high ISO. See the difference?

To explain all three elements (Aperture, Shutter, and ISO), view the video below:

Welcome to ym blog!

Thank you for visiting my blog site. I am new to blog sites, but I am excited to begin my blogging adventure. I have a class called “Web and Print Publication Design” that is inspirational. This class has taught me all the different newspaper layout terms and definitions as shown below. I would also like to highlight things I have learned.

Newspapers have grid systems. This newspaper has 7 columns, but is broken up in lesser columns in other areas of the newspaper. I know this picture is hard to see, but you get the general idea that newspapers are structured in a certain way and have terms that define specific areas of a newspaper. Newspaper Terms This site has more terms than I can name here and is an excellent site to use as a reference. Other terms I learned was kerning which is the space between letters or character spacing, I learned leading was the space between lines of text or simply line spacing. I learned “[o]ne of the earliest newspapers was the Roman Acta Diurna said to have been started by Julius Caesar”

The History of Printing and Printing Processes

I’ve known about the Gutenberg Press for many years and how it was the first to use movable type. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was “a hand press, in which ink was rolled over the raised surfaces of moveable hand-set block letters held within a wooden form and the form was then pressed against a sheet of paper”

Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press