Photoshop Practise - Jarvis Cocker Exercise

The Jarvis Cocker Photoshop activity has been done to help create a better understanding of Photoshop and it's features in accordance to making or editing a magazine.

First we started off with a simple image of Jarvis Cocker:

After getting this image of Jarvis Cocker from the internet I realised that this image was blurry and the background was more than one tone of purple, to solve this problem I decided to make the whole image black and white.

To make this image black and white I used a desaturation adjustment. I feel that making the image black and white makes the images itself more striking, whilst making the resolution appear much better than it actually is. 

To make the main image stand out more I decided to add a light blue coloured background. To do this I selected the background using the magic wand tool and then used the bucket tool to fill in the area selected. This made the overall image look more effective and striking.

This is the image with a full blue background, I feel like this really highlights the serious mood of the main image whilst also making it feel not overly formal. It juxtaposes the black and white image of the artist really well yet does not draws attention away from the image either. 

The image quality still looked unprofessional despite the making it black and white. To counteract this I decided to alter the main image using the tool 'posterise' and making it look a bit like pop art. This makes the main image look as if its meant to be partly pixelated.

I added a masthead in the top left corner as this is usually where the masthead is located on a magazine, I also included a bar code as this is usually located on the front of a magazine.

Doing this task has helped me gain a better understanding of Photoshop and what I can do to make images look better. I have also gained a few ideas on how I can layout my own magazine.