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I chose a picture I took in 2015 of a rainbow over lower campus and created an ad for UAF. After resizing the image to 960×341 pixels it looked pretty good. All of the transformations I attempted either made little difference or degraded the image. Since any transformation to reduce the image size would also likely reduce the image quality I left well enough alone.
I found online how to add text along a path and got the campus name to follow the rainbow. I also found how to add a logo and copied an official UAF logo as an EPS file, resized it to an unobtrusive size, and added it to the image too. Finally, there seemed to be too much blank space so I searched for the UAF motto. What luck – the motto, “Naturally
Inspiring” seemed to match the image perfectly, so I added it below the campus name as plain horizontal text in the same font. Ideally the font should be bolder but of the two pictures I took that day this one centered the rainbow perfectly. Any larger text would smother some of the image.
I liked it… Until I rechecked the image size. My 959K file had ballooned to over 6M! I tried several times to squeeze all of the layers into one layer hoping that would blend the overlays into the 959K background. No luck.
Then I realized I’d saved the image as a PSD instead of as JPG file. Saving as a JPG file dropped the image size back down to 959K. Lesson learned.
Strangely, Photoshop showed the image size as 959.1K but when I added it here the image size appeared as 103K.
This is nice photo and the simplicity of the banner works well with the image. Photoshop will hold the image at hand, but if you reopen the .jpg into photoshop you should have seen the new size. I’ve had many times had the same problems reading photoshop, but the more I used it the more acquainted I got with its features.
Thank you.
I think I’m going to keep playing with this photo throughout the class. Because the rainbow contains pretty much all of the colors in the rest of the image it’s a tricky picture to work with. Getting the rainbow to look good makes the rest of the image too dark or “contrasty”. I almost want to adjust the colors of the rainbow and sky separate from the rest of the image. I’m sure that’s doable but I need to learn a bit more first.