Intermediate Ict Gnvq - Unit 6 Evaluation

Evaluation

During this unit I have come across many different skills and have had to implement them into my work in different ways to make the best product I possibly could.

While I was creating my adverts in Photo Impact I had to use most of these skills. The first skill I used was the freehand selection tool which was used to cut out a certain area from a picture which enabled it to be inserted into another picture, I used this tool to cut out guitarists and insert them on a waterfall background. To insert the guitarists I also had to use another skill which involved copying and pasting between images, without this skill I wouldn't have been able to copy the freehand selected guitarist and paste it onto the background. As you can imagine, after taking something from one image and adding it to another, the guitarist and the background were out of proportion so I had to use another feature which was used to resize the guitarist, rotate it then finally move him to the correct position. The edges around the guitarist were not the same as the background it was on so I used an extremely useful tool called edge blending which slightly fades the edges of inserted image making it look as if it was meant to be there, not simply copied from another image. Throughout making the adverts I also used the blur and smudge tools, they are used to blur or smudge any part of an image to make something fit into an image easier or to create a sense of speed or heat. I used the blur tool on a family I inserted into a background of a wilderness - I used the tool so they looked like they were already in the image but also so the background looked hot. I also used the warp tool which in general seems a pretty useless tool but can create very interesting effects as it stretches different parts of the background, warping it into different places. I used the warp tool to make the edge of a field on the horizon look slightly more mountainous and lumpy rather than bland and flat. The final tool I used was the clone tool. This clones a certain area over another, for example I used it to clone a certain area of sky over a set of bushes, the outcome of which made it look like there were simply no bushes and the sky didn't look out of place.

The other half of the skills used were mainly found when creating the vector logos in word. One of the most important skills I used in creating vector logos was ungrouping a clipart image and only using the part I wanted, for example I ungrouped a globe inside a test tube so I was simply left with a globe to start creating my logo around. Throughout all both of the logos, one of the main components of them were auto shapes, for example both of my logos background were made of auto shapes and so were some of the more eye-catching features like the symmetrical arrows in one of my logos. After using an auto shape they did look extremely bland so I used another skill which was to fill the auto shape with a mix of one or two different colours to give it a nicer, inviting effect. Instead of having normal straight lines flowing throughout my auto shapes I decided to change the line size and style which made the lines look generally more attractive. A big part of the vector logos was resizing different images, this was great because it meant you could use many different sized images but simply resize them so they would all be in proportion. I used this in all my images to make sure, for example, the plane fitted inside the auto shape. A tool which goes side by side with the resizing tool is the rotate or flip tool, this is used to spin an image round or show the mirror image of it. I used this with the lightning bolts on my musical logo to make sure the bolts were symmetrical. Once all my images were ready and sized I had to use another tool to get the right ones over or under another one, this was the layering tool. This tool was used by me to make sure my auto shape was at the back as a background and to make sure the 'Holiday World Travel' text was shown above everything else. One of the features which I used I thought was fairly unnecessary as it didn't give tremendous help to your final logo, this was the 3D effects tool which added a 3rd dimension to a 2D auto shape. I used this on a star in my Families with Children logo to make it look like it was being looked down on. The final tool used in the vector logos was the WordArt, this made fancy looking text which could edited through the images properties. I used this to make both titles for my logos but then edited the default colours and styles until I made a design which look suitable to the rest of the advert.

During the creation of my adverts and logos, luckily, I didn't come across many problems at all but there were a few minor problems. The first bit of trouble I had occurred when I couldn't make a decent freehand sketch with the scribble tool, the drawings kept turning out to have very little resemblance to the image they were supposed to be. Another problem I had was trying to find a few certain images. I couldn't find a big enough background which I actually liked, most were too small but I did find one in the end. My final problem and probably the one which troubled me most was Photo Impact, I felt it was a bit tricky to use because the small icons on the side didn't give a clear explanation of what the actually tool did.

My main problem with the hardware and software that I worked with would have been the fact that the version of Photo Impact that we were working with was 3.02. At first I didn't think it would have been a problem but as I tried to catch up with some work at home I realised that the now standard edition was version 10 as this was the one I had on my computer at home and the version advertised on there website. This prevented me from getting on with any of the work during the holidays when I had the most free time.

Fortunately I was