RB: Advert Design 2

Original Photographs

• Before thinking about the final picture I would use on my advert, I practiced taking some photographs of the chessboard and editing it using Windows Live Photo Gallery. I wanted the chessboard to appear black and white in the advert, but the chessboard I was using was yellow and brown. For this reason I wanted to practice ajusting the colour to make it look black and white.
• This is an example of one of the shots I took:

and after I had edited the picture by decreasing the brightness and increasing the contrast as well as adjusting the colour settings and applying a red filter to the image to further increase the contrast.

• When I was taking these photos, I had to be careful to insure that no light was reflecting off the board. I also had to make sure the room was well lit enough that I would not need to use the flash on the camera as this would also refelct off the board.
• However, I found that the photos looked good enough to use after they had been digitally altered. I began to think about how I would lay out the final image and whether I would have to make any ajustments based on the first set of pictures.
• After thinking about my original design idea, I decided to change to the idea of the picture fading out to black rather than having a hand in the bottom corner. I thought this would be more typical of Bloc Party's past adverts.
• I did another shoot of the chessboard with chess pieces on the board. Although I did not use flash, the chess pieces also reflected light which caused more problems when editing. I attempted to remove this using the (?) on Windows Live Photo Gallery but found it did not work very well and that it would be easier if I reduced the reflection when taking the photo.
• This is an example of an original photo I took in this shoot:

and after I digitally altered it using similar techniques than before, such as increasing the brightness and decreasing the colour temperature and tint of the image.



•  After altering some of these pictures I noticed that I should not have placed the black chess pieces on the black squares on the board. I realised that it was difficult to see these pieces so I would have to do another shoot and either place the black chess pieces on white squares so they are more visable, or position the camera at a lower level so that the chess pieces are backed with a wall rather than the chessboard.
• When doing the third shoot, I kept the past shoots in mind to advoid making the same mistakes. I used a white wall as the background as the chess pieces would be clearly visable against it and it would not reflect light. I also thought about the positioning of the chess pieces and made sure that the black pieces were in positions where they would be clearly visable.
• This shoot was more successful than the previous two and I managed to get several shots I was happy with. I digitally altered these shots until I was happy with the composition and quality.

• After looking through the photos and thinking about my design, I decided that this would be the best picture for my advertisement as the chess pieces leave room for the the text and because of the low angle, I can easily fade the picture out at the bottom of the page.