Photoshop Postcards

After our Photoshop induction we were given a brief in which we had to create a series of postcards using Photoshop. We were each given a shape and were required to find examples of this shape around the college, take photos and edit them to create a series using photoshop.

The shape I was assigned was a square and I immediately thought of all the windows around the college, however after taking some photos of them, I didn't like how inconsistent they were with each other. They were all square but otherwise they had little in common, they were all spaced differently and I didn't see any other links.

After attempting to find some common ground with them I just decided to change the series. After spending hours in the mac suite trying to finish something I started taking pictures of the keyboard. I thought this could work well as, while most of the keys are square some aren't, so there would be some subtle variation in photos of different areas of the keyboard.

I wanted the subtle differences for example, blemishes on the keyboard, to be extremely defined, so I adjusted the levels, which exaggerated the dirt and fingerprints on the keyboard. I also wanted them to appear quite eerie and creepy so I increased the hue and brought the saturation down, which gave it dirty green undertones.

However this still left the image looking a bit basic so I adjusted the composition of the whole image. I made separate layers from sections of the image that intersected a key or a character on the keyboard and moved them around to break the image up.

Since the colours are all fairly neutral this wasn't an overwhelming change, it just makes it worth a second glance to identify the difference. I wanted to keep the back simple but include 'Leeds College Of Art' on the front. However, due the nature of the design and the characters on the keys I had to increase the lightness to let the type stand out.

To make the disconnection of the image a little more obvious I reduced the opacity of the background, bring the disjointed parts forward.

Final Postcards