A post for class…

The header image is a band with an overlay of the map of New Jersey that has a star marking New Brunswick. It is self explanatory to what it conveys since my target audience is people that want to find music and bands in New Brunswick.

The header image is not a local New Brunswick band but a stock image off Adobe’s stock image service. You can use Adobe stock for free with Creative Cloud so I wanted to use my subcription to it’s full potential. The image was marked for reuse non-commecially and this is not a commecial blog. The map is also marked as Creative Commons. Although I don’t think a map can (or should) be copyrighted I still made sure it was able to be reused.

I used Photoshop to edit the header. I first resized the image to fit my theme using the Transform tool. I then did some basic editing using the Curves tool so that the images on my site would work together. I then added the image of New Jersey. Since it was smaller than header image it got pixelated upon making it bigger. This was easily fixed by adding a soft outer glow with the Layer Style tools. I also drew a star on it to mark New Brunswick. I then merged the layers with the map and the star and brought down the opacity so it would lay nicely above the header image. Manovich’s article may be outdated but I was surprised to see that Photoshop hasn’t changed all that much in 15 years. I mostly worked with the Layer and Layer Style features he mentioned.

Working in layers is beneficial so because it lets you easily change aspects of the image. For example, I was able to easily create a version of my header to work with my post layout. Earlier software like MS paint that only lets you work in a single layer makes it much harder to change things. Working in a single layer is almost like working on paper. If you make a mistake you would have to erase a whole portion of of your work. As Davison mention’s in his article the single layer was MS Paint’s main limitation. Although I may have been able to create a similar image as my header in a single layer, I would only have one chance to get it right and it would not look as polished since I wouldn’t be able to add effects or adjust the opacity.