Digipak & Poster Planning 2 - Programs

When creating my Digipak, I will need to decide which programs to use when following certain parts of my plan. From my previous experience during my project last year at AS level I have learnt a lot about the decision of programs and your experience with them. Moreover I grew in confidence with Macromedia Fireworks and the image manipulation involved within the software. I do regret not purchasing adobe photoshop and using a more advanced and 'more suited' program, however this year at 'Poole Grammar School' we have purchased Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 and during the original decision stages of my project and the very beginning of the year, I have slowly been learning how to use the program, from experience and online tutorials, which have prooven very beneficial. I found practicing certain manipulation effects and use with other tools has really given me the confidence to be creative with this program and make my own. I would highly reccommend practicing with your program before use, untill you are at a comfortable level, to be creative and not worry about learning during the proccess of your preliminary task.

Adobe Photoshop CS5.1
Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop. The CS rebranding also resulted in Adobe offering numerous software packages containing multiple Adobe programs for a reduced price. Adobe Photoshop is released in two editions: Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra 3D image creation, motion graphics editing, and advanced image analysis features. Adobe Photoshop Extended is included in all of Adobe's Creative Suite offerings except Design Standard, which includes the Adobe Photoshop edition.
Alongside Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, Adobe also publishes Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Lightroom, collectively called "The Adobe Photoshop Family". In 2008, Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based image editing tool to edit photos directly on blogs and social networking sites; in 2011 a version was released for the Android operating system and the iOS operating system.
Adobe only supports Windows and Macintosh versions of Photoshop, but using Wine, Photoshop CS5 can run well on Linux.

I found the benefits of this program came with the range of 'set' effects and tools allowing quick and easy manipulation at your picking, as well as custom manipulation when necessary. Within my Digipack the control of layers and reveal helped show multiple images to create a feeling of hardening and softening textures with light and dark lighting effects.

PaintDotNet
This program was great for small edits, such as copying and pasting images with need for small scale changes, it prooved much easier to do so on a much more limited and simpler program as I could import and export edited and images in the progress of being edited to and from Photoshop so that I could make slight transformations. With my poster this prooved very helpfull when cropping images taking from the set of our music video shoot, and arranging them before putting them back into photoshop as a new image and or layer. Additionally minor light effects and the 'blur' effect were interesting to play around with, as they differ from the custom effects from photoshop and provided an interesting dynamic in my method of production, which revolved around experemintal procedure, mixed with vague planning.