Visual Rhetoric 2.2: Photoshop Workshop #2

Today’s plan:

• Gries Reading Highlights
• Photoshop Tutorial #1: Working with layers
• Photoshop Tutorial #2: Recreating Obama Hope
• Homework

Gries Reading

The rest of chapter six might not have had too much inventive material for making a poster, but it did raise a number of interesting questions regarding visual rhetoric. Here’s a few points I wanted to quickly highlight before we begin our tutorials today:

And there was one significant inventive point: the difference between a raster image and a vector image (page 146). Gries notes that this was a key step in David Erasti’s enlarging and distributing Obama Hope posters. Since you are making posters, and likely working with smaller web images, you’ll need how to do this.

First, let’s get a sense of the difference between raster images and vector images. Given the dimensions of this project (11×17, with a 300 pixel resolution), you will likely need to increase the size of any image you want to use in your poster. To do this, you will likely need to convert a raster image into a vector, otherwise your image will pixelate horribly. Unfortunately, you can’t do this in Photoshop without using a plug-in. But, fortunately, this is easy to do in Adobe Illustrator and we have access to Illustrator in this lab and via the USF APP portal. To be honest, most people design documents for print in Illustrator, not Photoshop (they often edit the images in Photoshop and then import and arrange them in Illustrator). In an effort to minimize the technologies we have to learn, I focused on Photoshop. But I encourage you to mess around with Illustrator, it has virtually the same interface and options as Photoshop, with a few other print-friendly features.

Here’s some instructions for converting an image from raster to vector in Illustrator.

Here’s a video tutorial for how to convert a raster to a vector in Illustrator (tutorial starts at 47 seconds).

Here’s a second tutorial (also only 5 minutes), that edits a photo in Photoshop before importing it into Illustrator (this one seems a bit easier to follow).

Finally, note that you will have to save the file as a special format in Photoshop (an AI or EPS) and need to input a file size when you open it in Photoshop. Here is one final walkthrough for how to open a vector file in Photoshop.

Photoshop Tutorials

As advertised, today we are going to work through two tutorials that aim to expand your comfort and abilities with Photoshop.

• First, Phlearn’s Image and Text tutorial
• Second, Blue Lightning TV’s Obama Hope tutorial (we’ll see if we have time to get through this one).

1:35? Time to Ship It

Since we are only working with two images today, I don’t think you need to .zip them (you can if you want). But you should be able to upload two images to the Photoshop #2 workshop in Canvas.

Homework

There’s a few things to do this weekend:

• First, finish doing your presidential campaign research, working through the list of materials and processes that we made during our last class. Remember to check back to Tuesday’s notes to find the list of materials and processes we generated in class.
• Second, convert one raster image into a vector image in Illustrator and then open and edit it in Photoshop. This can either be practice, or you can start working on your poster.
• Third, I am changing the reading assignment from the syllabus. Since many of you are ready to draft your poster, I want you to read White Space chapters 5 (layout) and 14 (printing a document). When it comes time to write up your process, I will ask you to explicate how specific design principles in White Space impacted your design and execution.