Lab 2 Reflection Journal

     Hello internet. I've completed the second lab of my Visual Design course. The name of the lab was Image Adjustments. In the lab we explored various ways to change some properties of our image, mainly relating to color. Our task was to open an image of our teacher's puppy in photoshop, make 10 copies of only the dog and resize them so they fit in one frame.  After that we were supposed to change some property of each individual dog, mainly color, using the image adjustment options avaliable in photoshop.
     The way we adjusted the color of each dog was long, but once you got the grip of it the sequence of steps didn't feel to strenuous. After opening the picture of the dog we used the lasso tool in photoshop to select only the dog. We had multiple option when using the lasso. The normal lasso allowed you to hand pick what is selected and what's not. However since a human is controlling what the lasso gets it could be innacurate. Next is the polygonal lasso. It also needs a human to hand pick what gets selected or not but it draws straight lines. You basically set a vertex, draw a straight line to another vertex and continue until you come aroung the object being selected and close the shape by connecting to the first vertex set. Last was the magnetic lasso. Unlike the other two lassos, the magnetic lasso selects an object based on color differences. All you have to do is drag the lasso around the object you want to select and let the program select where the lines are drawn for you. I ended up using the magnetic lasso for my project mainly to save time and energy.
     After we selected the dog we made duplicate layers of only the dog by right clicking and selecting duplicate via copy. We resized the copy to proportion and repeated the steps 9 more times to make a total of 10 copies. We placed the individual dogs in different places and turned off the background. To edit and individual dog we selected that dog's layer, used the magic wand and clicked a blank space, when to select in the menu bar, clicked select inverse, and then did whatever we wanted to the dog. We did that for all 10 dogs. Each layer had a mask so we merged the layer and mask. We turned the background back on and turned in our finished lab.
     These skills are important for a web designer because a web designer must know how to alter something so it looks good. Things or aspects in the design of a website might not look good at first. But knowing how to alter a property of that image, like hue and saturation, may make it look good. In this lab I learned how to edit specific objects in photoshop as well as make duplicates of an object. I learned color of an object can be altered in photoshop and that an object can look nicer with some image adjustments.