L01

Pixel Theory

 

A monitor is made up of individual pixels. A pixel is a small dot that changes colour and when put together with other pixels, creates the image that you can see on the screen. The more pixels that you have on a monitor, the clearer and sharper the image is. This is called Screen Resolution.

Adobe Photoshop

Computer Colour Theory

RGB Colour - Used for digital art and any work that is designed to be shown on a screen. The colours used in RGB is Red, Green and Blue. Those colours are then used to create a broad spectrum of other colours.

CMYK Colour - Used for any work that is going to be printed as it contains the colours used in printing. It contains Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black

Grayscale Colour - Contains colours of Black, White and all the shades of grey inbetween. Used as an effect more than anything else.


Lab Colour - Contains more colours than the human eye can comprehend.

File Compression

When saving images on photoshop, you have different options that you can use. The above example is JPEG images which is one of the most used file types for saving images. The JPEG is a compressed picture format and photoshop gives you different qualities that can you save. On the top left we can see the original image with a file size of 1.37mb which is rather large for a single image. The top right is a JPEG preview with a high quality, the image size has been reduced to 26.6kb and the time it takes to create the image is 10 seconds. The bottom previews are of a medium and low quality and as the quality goes down, as does the size of the file as well as the time it takes to create the file.

Layers

One of the advanced features of Adobe Photoshop is the use of layers. Layers allow you to add multiple images on top of each other and manipulate them separately. This is useful for design work as it allows you to add text and images together but able to change them without disturbing the other. As en example, you have an image on one layer and text on another, you can add effects to the image such as blurring without making the text blurred. Layers at the top are put to the top of all the images and vice versa, and they can be arranged whenever you need, to change the position of the images. The layers also contain a list of all the effects that you have so you can keep an eye on what each layer contains.






Filters

Another major feature of Photoshop is the filters. They are used for adding certain effects to your images or text within photoshop. These effects can be used in conjuction with the layer feature in order to add different effects to different layers giving a very unique feel to your image. The filters in photoshop are among some of the best in any image editting software and is the main reason that photoshop has become so vastly popular over the years. Within each of the filters that are more effects to gain the exact kind of blur (as an example) that you want.

Premiere Pro

Layers

 Very similar to photoshop, premiere pro contains layers that are used to add different video and audio on separate tracks allowing you a lot more flexibility over your video. You can layer the video and audio on top of each other and put effects on each of the video's individually without disturbing the other videos. This technique is very useful in video editting, especially for adding text for title and credit sequences. Aside from what was mentioned above, you can also add images into your videos. You can hide and lock any of your layers to ensure that you do not edit layers that you did not want to so that you can align everything perfectly.

File Formats


Just like images, video can be stored in many different file formats, all with different properties and quality. Some of the most common are MPEG, AVI and MP4. MPEG is most commonly used for DVD's and television signals as it can handle streams from both audio and video. MPEG generally has lossy audio and video so is not used for high definition but was used at a time before HD came about. AVI was developed my Microsoft and stands for Audio Video Interleave and again can handle both audio and video simultaneously, with multiple streams from either. MP4 is commonly used for streaming over the internet and can be used to store video and audio but also images and subtitles as well which makes it very useful.

Effects


Very similar to filters in Adobe Photoshop, different effects can be applied to videos to give the video a uniqueness or add something that was perhaps not available when the video was filmed. Premiere Pro also comes with an addon called After Effects which adds a huge variety of different effects that you can add really complex effects such as gunshot wounds and blood splatter. There are also come simpler effects that can be added such as chroma key which allows you to add images or other videos behind a video using greenscreen technology. This can be useful for adding exotic locations that you perhaps could not have filmed. So effects are very useful in adding things that you could not have done during the filming process.

Adobe Flash

Keyframes

Adobe Flash is used for the creation of animations amongst other things and keyframes are extremely important when it comes to anything that it does. The timeline works on a series of frames that when put together and played will creation a moving animation. Keyframes are added when changes are made on the timeline such as adding an image or movie clip into your animation, or moving something across the screen using a tween. When keystrokes are added to the timeline, the add a small dot to indicate that that frame is a keystroke and usually has a change in the animation. Keyframes when added will also copy what was in the previous frame in order for you to make small changes to it which is useful for animations as you can make tiny changes to it. 

Tweens

Tweens are very useful in animation building. You use then along with keyframes to create motion within your animation at the click on a button. For example, you could have an image in which you want to move across the screen, you can do this easily by placing where it starts, adding a keyframe and placing where you want the image to finish. You then just add a tween to the frames in between and flash will do the rest for you. The movement will be as long as how many frames that the image moves through, for example a 25fps animation with a tween over 25 frames would take a second to complete. There are different tweens from straight forward movement to rotation and scaling of an image.

File Formats


Flash animations can be exported as common formats such as MPEG and AVI but also as a SWF file with is specific to flash files. SWF stands for ShockWave Flash, ShockWave being the name of the player that allows it to be used on websites and your computer. SWF allows the flash file to be displayed as an animated vector graphic with audio, video and actionscript, which will start automatically on a website and allow full interactivity making it the most commonly used for online browser games or "flash games" as it is known. The other formats are not used very often and will only allow you to see animations of audio and video with no interactivity of any kind at all.

ActionScript

Within Adobe Flash, it has it's own programming language which allows users to create complex and interactive games or movies. The programming language makes use of JavaScript for the majority of it's more complex features but ActionScript ties in with the timelines and tweens of flash itself meaning that the entire game does not need to be made using only ActionScript but all the animations can be handled using Flash's functions.