Toned Photos

For my photo essay, I took pictures documenting my morning commute on Metra trains. I then toned and adjusted the pictures in Photoshop to make them look as good as they could. I did this because raw photo files don't always look as presentable as they could, and Photoshop allows you to bring out a photos full potential.

I adjusted the brightness and contrast in the pictures so they would accurately convey the lighting conditions of the early morning sunlight. I also adjusted the hue and saturation of the colors to give them the warmer feel that the early morning sunlight lends to a scene.

With the photo inside the train, I did similar brightness, contrast and color adjustments in order to emphasize the artificial lighting inside the train and how it makes the color scheme inside the train look a bit cooler than the outdoor scenes with natural lighting.

For the crowd scenes, I also had to adjust the sharpness of the photos in order to reduce motion blur.


EDIT 11/1/10:

I forgot to show an original, raw photo for comparison, so here's the original shot of the train coming in:

 

Like I said above, I lowered the brightness and increased the contrast in the toned version to better convey the early morning sunlight and the warm colors that it gives to everything. This adjustment, along with some minor color tweking with hue and saturation, let the bright red on the front of the train and the vivid colors of the commuters' clothing stand out more in comparison to the more muted, dull colors of the original raw file.

Infographic

This project required me to take a set of data and represent it visually as an infographic. The data was a set of statistics related to coffee consumption in the Midwest and the rest of the country.

The list of ways Midwesterners drink coffee, combined with the percentages given, lent itself most readily to a table format because it had two correlating sets of information that needed to be represented side by side.

I turned the percentage of coffee drinkers by region into a visual map rather than just a list of numbers because that will help readers understand what areas of the country the numbers apply to.

I took the list of the most coffee-reliant professions and turned it into a bullet-point list for a cleaner visual presentation that is less cluttered and easier to read. (The original list was just one long sentence, with each item separated by commas.)

Page Reproduction

This project involved reproducing a page layout from a magazine using InDesign. I paid particular attention to the use of sans-serif typefaces throughout the page (in this case, Helvetica), as well as to differences in type size and color.

I laid out the pictures an text boxes (filled with generic filler text to avoid typing out the entire article) with the appropriate spacing between everything measured using a pica ruler, and I also took into account the kerning between individual letters in the headline. I did my best to find pictures as close to those on the page as I could to give my design a greater sense of accuracy and authenticity.