Research and Communication Skills

Learning Material for Photoshop

Materials from week 0 induction at Winchester School of Art and details on setting up your iSolutions university account

A share of information on why & how to make copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Burn cd's and copy to memory sticks.

Short videos and Guides on how to print to various devices at WSA. Why 300dpi is important for printing, why PDF's are the defacto standard for printing and the how and where to get your files printed.

Lecture on web 2.0 and its impact and use for creative thinkers/artists.

Lecture on Basic copyright and the current enforcement of the law and the negative impact on Artists and Designers.

Materials on creating files and folders on the Mac Operating System (10.5 / Leopard). Creating folders to organise your files is very important, this will help you to keep track of your work, create simple backups (making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event.) and much much more. Whatever computer you like using, they all work on the basic principle of using folders to organise files. Files and folder should have meaningful names do not use special Characters like £$%&! and never use a ‘.’ except before a file extension. It is best to start creating your folders in the documents (or my documents) folder and not on your desktop, it gets untidy.

Materials related to the session titled Digital Collector as part of the Research and Communication Skills

You can capture an image of your entire screen by typing Command-Shift-3. Typing Command-Shift-4 lets you choose a specific part of your screen. Region capture - you can change how the region selection area changes by using the following keys - note that you can release the original keys once the crosshairs appears, as long as you’ve started dragging your mouse, and you keep the mouse button down. • Space Bar: Press and hold the Space Bar, and the size of the current region is then locked and can be dragged around the screen. As long as you hold the Space Bar down, the region’s size is locked and it can be dragged about. • Shift: Press and hold the Shift key, and one side of the region will be locked, based on which way you then move the mouse. For instance, if you press and hold Shift, and then move your mouse down, you’ll only be able to resize the region vertically; the horizontal size will be fixed. Move the mouse left or right, and you can resize the region horizontally while holding the vertical size fixed. • Option: Press and hold Option while dragging your region, and you’ll change the way the region grows as you drag. By default, your region is anchored at the upper left corner; when you press Option, the anchor point is moved to the center of the current region, and it expands in all directions from that point. For more tips check the links!

Its easy to collect images from the internet for research.

Sometimes you may need to scan in photographs, books or magazines. Scanning is the easy part but making sure your settings are right is the important part. Scan at 300dpi to the size you need to print A4 scanner but you need A3 print - no problem scan at 600dpi Always scan as a TIFF file format as this will give you a non compressed source to work from.

Getting images from a Digital Camera is pretty straight forward. However this is the easy part, its getting the right image and making sure your digital file is good enough for your output. Set you camera or mobile phone to the highest settings, this will give you more options when you come to manipulate or edit the file Remember to make copies of files for editing so you can always return to your original image if you need too

Slides and materials from each weeks session in one handy location