03/02/14 Introduction

Within this blog I intend to give you the readers, a walk through of my first Digital Imaging Software university project. The project is to create a one minute long promotion video of a chosen subject, and to produce the dvd cover, and a disc label. Along the way I will be giving detailed guidance to all the programs and techniques that I use.

I will think about the criteria of the project and decide about an interesting and amusing subject by next week.

Ideas I have had...

A one minute long video packed full of Karl Pilkingtons most funny quotes.
A  'mash up' video combining South Park, The Simpsons and Family Guy interacting with each other.

Firstly here is a little theory behind colours and file formats...

Colours

• Two different colour models...

RGB (red-green-blue)
CMYK (cyan magenta yellow key (key controls the saturation of the colours)

• When designing pages for the internet take into account 'web safe' colours...

Netscape introduced a fixed color palette of 216 colors that will be used on platforms with a graphics mode with only 256 colors. Other colors will be dithered to that color palette. Click here for more information on this subject.

• Terminology

Hue - colour
Saturation - intensity of the colour
Tint - Adding white to a colour
Shade - Adding black to a colour

• Colour blindness

Take into account 1 in 7 people are colour blind, will
 this affect your final composition?

File Formats

• GIF...

- Only 256 colours are used within this format.
- Lossless compression, meaning that no colours are lost during the compression process.
- Best for use with graphics with large areas of block colours, and also good for presenting text on a website.

• JPEG...

- Millions of colours are possible with this format.
- Lossy compression style, the file will lose informatio everytime it is saved. Therefore a file is usually converted into this format once it is complete.
- Good for photos as smooth gradients compress well, not good for sharp edges.

• PNG (Portable Network Graphic)

- Not all browsers support this format.
- Lossless compression
- Can occasionally be smaller in size than a GIF.

• TIFF (Tagged Image Format File)

- This is the industry standard format.
- Lossless compression.
- Allows you to save each layer when using photoshop.

• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)

- Can handle animated graphics.
- Uses an XML text file to control the behaviour of the image components. This means that when scaling an image, no quality is lost as the image is recalculated via the XML code at the desired size.

• EXR (openEXR)

- Open Standard.
- Lossless compression.
- Multi-channel images (specular, diffuse, alpha, normals)