Photoshop has features that adjust your photographs at the click of a button, one of these being the shadow and highlight correction tool that is under the adjustments menu. The shadow and highlight correction tool is a tonal editing option and makes adjusting pictures much easier.

The tool has a set of sliders for shadows and highlights that you adjust until the balance of tones is correct. I have found using sliders is much easier than levels and curves and gives better results.

Match Colour is another feature that will help you to make two pictures that need to be combined look like they have similar colour tones. For example if you have had a portrait taken with flash and want to combine another photograph of someone taken in sunlight. To do this you need to open both images and select the target and destination and then adjust the sliders until it’s as close as you want. The match colour tool also works if you are copying and pasting parts from one image onto another and it is ideal for people who shoot panoramas and want a natural colour transition from one frame to the next so that the entire image blends together perfectly.

Photomerge is another feature that is good for people who want to piece together panoramic photographs. The feature has been programmed to stitch together photographs that have been taken in a series such as a panorama, it automatically finds the edges where a blend should occur and merges them for you without you having to cut and blend the photos yourself.

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular design programmes used by Graphic Designers and Web Developers today, this is because of its advanced level of tools and effects when it comes to editing photographs and designing graphics.

The programme was created by Adobe and works with both Windows (PC) and Macintosh. Photoshop’s name portrays it to be a programme solely designed to edit or repair photographs but it is capable of far more than this and once you have practiced tutorials and used your imagination you can create some amazing imagery using Photoshop.

The original versions of Photoshop were produced only for the Mac that allowed image editing to become affordable and accessible on your own personal computers; now Photoshop is industry standard when it comes to image editing.

The programme contains a large selection of image editing tools alongside an advanced capability of producing numerous layers, allowing images to be added, moved and rearranged over and under each other for different effects. It will also read from and convert to a large number of formats but uses its own format for layers, which is PSD. 

I think it is clear that a machine can design and there will  come a time when all the human designer does is supervise  the work of the computer which will be programmed to be  able to complete design work whilst supervised by a human  designer, perhaps computer aided design is actually the  future of the digital world?

If this is the case then there may come a time where the human designers are not even needed to supervise the design process because the work completed by the computer is somewhat better than the human design and human input into the computers work.

Computers continue to shock us with what they are actually able to do, machines are now being able to do things which humans thought only they would ever be able to do, all of these are factors which prove the development of technology and artificial computer intelligence. I think that the design industry doesn’t necessarily want computers to be able to do everything that human designers can do, but setting certain challenges for computers can help to aid the human designers so they can focus on work that needs more human input and information from a human source.      

If machines do become as creative and intelligent as humans, in the future will there actually be any need to further education after school? Education is there to help broaden a persons knowledge of a subject with exploration of certain topics and issues, in order to have an advantage over others when it comes to getting a job, but within the design industry if it is machines that do all the work and there is no need for human input, post-graduates regardless of their knowledge, fresh idea’s and possibility of input to a brief will not be needed, machines may be used for all aspects of the process of design causing knock on effects within the vacancy for jobs in the creative industry. 

The design process in terms of design on the computer at present uses     the human designer to complete the majority of the work, and the    computer helps throughout this process by correcting any mistakes and     providing a range of tools to help with the design, also giving        suggestions as to where things should be, colour palettes, sizes, layouts  etc… the computer is merely a clever tool used to design on and helps to  produce the human designers expectations.

 As technology and computers become more advanced I believe the role  of the human designer and the computer will change dramatically, the  computer will be given the job of completing a design and the human  designer will be an observer ensuring the design was produced correctly.  This way the human designer suffers no stress and simply has to provide  small instructions to the computer of they need to – the computer does  all the hard work.

 Computers will have a far more active roll in the production of the design and will ask questions of the designer to problems which the computer believes it cannot handle itself, so the designer will still be making small decisions but only when needed, drawing work will be being completed by the computer and small changes will be being made by the designer if they are needed, computers will be participating more in the design process and this will also help the human designer to stop producing similar work over and over, making them to stay out of ‘routine’ work.             

The format GIF’s can be transformed to create a transparent background or element to the image, meaning a background colour or image of the website you are using your GIF files on can be seen through the particular areas which you define to become transparent. To create transparency first you need to –

1.) Open the image that you would like to add transparency to, if the image has already been highly compressed to prepare for use on the web when you zoom into the image you will notice all the pixels are distorted around the edges, pixilation will be especially high if the compressed image was originally saved as a highly compressed JPEG format. If the image was originally created in Photoshop and saved as a PSD then pixilation wont be a problem but if the image has come from another source then it will more than likely have this problem.

2.) Before you can start working on the image you will need to get rid of all the extra dots around the edges so you can make a clean selection around the image itself, the cleaner the edges of a image the easier it will be to later get a perfect selection with the Magic Wand Tool. The same applies if your image is part of a larger image; everything surrounding it needs to be removed

3.) Using the Zoom Tool zoom into your image so you can see all the edges clearly and then use to Eraser Tool to remove the extra pixels from the edges of the image, including any extra white space, the more precise you are the better your final transparent GIF will be, especially if your final outcome is going to be placed on a contrasting coloured background.

4.) Once you have cleaned up your image use the Magic Wand Tool to select the white space around your image and you should have a perfect selection around the white space (non image) area of the document, drag this layer onto the New Layer Icon and this will make a copy. Select the new copy of the layer and press Delete which will remove the surrounding white space, then click onto the background layer and go Select > All > Delete, click on the eye icon on the background layer and this will hide the layer and show you the transparent areas – CTRL & CLICK on the new layer and your selection will appear back around the image.

5.) In Channels make a new channel and fill the selection of the image with white, then press CTRL & D – this will deselect.

6.) Return to the layers palette to make your image layer active, go to Image > Mode > Indexed Colour and click OK, then go to File > Export > GIF89a. A drop down will appear called Transparency from, choose Alpha 1 and you should see your image turn greyed out in the preview, showing the areas which will be transparent, click OK and then test your image on your web page. 

Before machines became so advanced and mechanical reproduction was introduced, duplicates of art works high in demand were made by being copied by hand, the artists would sometimes create numerous versions of a painting or made very similar replicas, but the usual occurrence would be that students, apprentices or assistants produced the copies.

Handmade copies were using just as sort after as the original, but there were obvious drawbacks to this technique being the artist would have to pay the person who produced the copies a good wage, so it was expensive, time – consuming and involved hard labour. And still there is only a few of the copies made and they were never exact but usually just a translation or an interpretation of the original.

The need to multiply an image or a design has become more popular as the design world and industry has developed, it is hard to believe that people would actually sit and reproduce the same thing over and over by hand now we are living in a world full of high quality colour printers and photocopiers, we take for granted the easy method of reproduction, you can scan a piece of work into a computer and print it 1,000 times over in a matter of a few minutes.

This also is a example of how the digital era is making us as human creatives lazy, and the appreciation of an original piece of artwork or design is becoming almost unheard of due the fact artwork is repeatedly reprinted in art books, on canvas and even onto cups and mouse mats, all these factors result in loosing the ‘special’ element of seeing the artwork. 

With digital reproduction becoming more popular is any work actually produced as a ‘one off’ anymore? Pieces of contemporary fine art which have survived for hundreds of years still do exist but alongside thousands of images which are produced and then reproduced with the aid of machines.

Fine Art and contemporary pieces are now available for everyone to view, one form of this being the introduction of the internet, another development in technology, where you can just type in a name of a piece of work and it appears there in front of you on screen, you don’t have to go and visit a gallery or a museum, although sometimes it takes seeing the original piece there in front of you to appreciate just how special a ‘one off’ piece or original is.

There now appears to be a secondary system of recording where artworks can be reproduced and put into books, journals and magazines, shown through moving image in the form of films and television shows, advertisements and replica’s of sculptures sold at museum shops, art is available to more people than ever and in many more forms than the original due to the development in technology. 

Clear, consistant icons, graphic identity schemes and graphic or text based information and summary screens can give the user confidence that they can find what they are looking for without wasting their time.

The user should always be able to return easily to your home page and to other major navigation points in the site.  These basic links should be present and in consistenet locations on every page.  Graphic buttons will provide basic navigation links and create a graphic identity that tells users they are within the site domain.