Portfolio Practice #1

 With the end of the first semester, and the beginning of the new year, it's finally time to begin on one of the biggest parts of this class: the Portfolio. I did end up choosing the Magazine, for the same reasons written in the first post. I will be working on it with my friend Hailey Sanchez. 

To start preparing us for our upcoming projects, we were assigned a practice by our teacher. For the magazine, we were to make our own book covers with a picture taken on campus. We were allowed to add other images and graphics, and my original idea was to do so. 

We were given time during class to go out and film/ take pictures, and we took some good pictures the first day. Unfortunately, we did face some challenges. We lost the SD Card for the pictures taken on the first day, so we had to go out and take pictures the second day. 

I was going to choose a scenic picture from my gallery and insert the picture we took, but when I did so, it looked extremely unrealistic and pasted on. So I decided to just use the original background, but do a generative fill to make it the correct size since it was originally taken as a landscape photo. 

When even this was unsatisfactory, I decided to use another picture entirely. 

The entire process was extremely difficult and frustrating, considering my lack of creativity, my lack of skills with InDesign, and my lack of motivation. I had to watch multiple videos that were not really helpful in particular. After realizing that my original idea wasn't going to work, I had to research how to do generative fill. I used multiple websites and they were of some help. I also had to learn some features in Photoshop in order to edit my original picture. 

I'm still unhappy with the final project and I feel like I could've done much better if I didn't have such as lack of inspiration and if I knew how to use InDesign better. Although I learned a lot just by experimenting around, it was also a huge waste of my time. I switched my idea so many times and in the end just settled on a simple non-fiction nature book cover. 

 

I think overall, although the process was incredibly stressful and I'm not satisfied with the final product, it was a good learning experience. I now know where I lack and what areas I need to improve in, one of those being my skills with Adobe Apps. I now know I need to watch basic tutorials and videos on the usage of InDesign, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. 

Thanks so much for tuning in, catch you later!

Resources Used: 

https://www.montilladesign.com/post/extend-images-with-generative-expand-in-adobe-indesign#:~:text=Angelo%20Montilla,follow%20along%20in%20this%20tutorial. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/masking-images-adobe-indesign-comprehensive-guide-ratan-ali-pf6gc