Lab 8 Reflection

      A subject of a photo is usually the person, object, or thing that is the main focus of the photo. Attention can be brought to the subject of a photo via emphasis. One way to emphasize the subject of a photo would be to  have the subject be more detailed than the background, or everything else that surrounds it. In our 8th lab we put emphasis on a turkey using photoshop.

     This my Thanksgiving card I made for my lab. The top of this JPEG is all white space because the card is a foldable. I added space to the top by increasing the canvas size of the original photo of the turkey. This was done, however, after I put emphasis on the turkey. The way I did this was first using selection tools to select the turkey. In this lab I used the magnetic lasso for selection as to not create many sharp edges and it was easier to select the turkey with the magnetic lasso than other selection tools (I tried). After the turkey was selected I went to Select in the menu bar and hit Inverse. This selected everything but the turkey. That means the entire background of the photo was now selected. Then I right clicked and selected layer via copy creating a layer with the background only and not the turkey. I then added a vector mask to this layer by hitting the vector layer button at the bottom of the layers panel. I selected the mask and went to Filters. I went to Blur and was given various choices for the type of blur I wanted. I ended up choosing the Box Blur. I also got to adjust how blurry I wanted the background to be by moving the sliders that determine the radius. I moved the blurriness down from default since that background didn't look too natural. I wanted to make the turkey have more detail but I didn't want to take away too much detail from the background so that it feels unnatural. After I was satisfied I added some text and increased the canvas size.
     So why would these skills be important to a web designer? A web designer needs to know how to emphasize things in their work. This is to help them draw the audience's attention to what the web designer wants them to pay attention to. Sticking to turkeys, if a web designer was designing a website for a turkey farm they would want whoever was visiting the web sites to pay attention to all the turkeys the farm has to offer. They wouldn't want the viewer to get distracted with thing that don't matter like the scenery that surrounds the farm. Emphasizing a subject makes a web designer's work more beautiful and it is important for a web designer to know how to emphasize things in their work to make it more attractive and make the viewers pay attention to what matters the most.

I'm using Ps CS6 instead of Ps CC in this screenshot