Creating a test image with Fotofix

Since my last post I have been using the free photo editing website I mentioned last time called Fotofix.(http://www.fotofix.com/free-photo-editing-fotofix-yourself/). Although this editor is marketed to be used to edit pictures of people, I wanted to see what else could be produced. So I found two images one of a street in Central London and another of a beach in South Africa and used Fotofix to combine them:

This image was created using four layers. three of which can be seen on the layers panel in the above image. My background layer, which is not shown, was a the sunset sky (without the plane), I then I added the picture of London to the background as another layer. This is done using the Layers menu from the panel. I then used the magic wand tool to get rid of most of the background that was behind the building, then used the magic wand tool and the eraser to neaten the image without effecting my sky background.

Photoshop definitely has more options and styles of selection tool, which would have left me with a sharper finish; I found it more difficult to get a good finish with the tools on Fotofix, but as it is free it is expected. I have found that using this website for trials and mock ups has been very useful. I have also used this website to create some test versions of the layout of my portfolio, which I will upload later.

After adding the London scene layer, I then added the beach layer and did the same as I did with the London Layer. When using Photoshop in lectures I have always used the masking tool on the layers panel to erase back to the background however, the masking tool for this software seems to have a different kind of function, so the eraser was used instead. I also created my own brush for the eraser when removing the old background from the beach layer, as there were some specks of the background that were not removed in the palm trees and a more spikey brush was needed. Once this was complete I then added an image of a plane and used the same method again, it also originally has a white logo on the tail,  to remove it I used the clone tool to make the tail of the plane solid red red.

The quality and finish of this picture is not as high as it would be if it was done using Photoshop, but for a free and easy to use editor it is something I have come to use a lot to create pictures which will help me plan the layout of my portfolio. To create my print and web outcome for my portfolio I will be using a combination of Photoshop, InDesign and Illutrator to create my images; I am also looking into free alternatives for the others as well. I have come across 'Inkscape' which uses vectors in the same way as Illustrator, so this is something I will definitely be experimenting with at a later date.

Although I have not been able to have much practice actually using Photoshop, etc. I have been watching free online tutorials on 'Lynda' an the Adobe website. I also did a free Photoshop CS6 ALISON course online a little while back but forgot to post. It was really helpful and I got some good notes from the videos and managed to get 100% in the final assessment! This particular course was based on CS6 but there are also ones for older versions, so I must find out whether they are worth doing, in terms of how similar they are to the one I use.