FMX210_Blog1_02/06_SMiller

 Sophie Miller

Weekly Blog Post 1 - 2/3 - 2/7


Hi! This is my first blog for Digital Media Spring 2025. This past week, I worked with Adobe Firefly and used it in Photoshop to explore layers and different editing techniques. Firefly helped me understand how AI tools can expand a person's creativity and make the design process easier. Adobe Firefly is a generative AI tool that lets users create and edit images using text prompts. We took the photos Adobe Firefly created and put them into Photoshop and worked with techniques like layering and different types of blending the layers to make it more cohesive. The main project we worked on this week was creating a colored pencil ad by generating a lion lying down in a grassy field, and we had to make the lion look like it was sketched with real colored pencils. It took a lot of trial and error to try different prompts and filters to get the right picture, and it was interesting to see what Adobe Firefly spit out with the different prompts and how they changed just by changing the smallest thing in the prompt. I learned several new tools and techniques this week. Generative AI allows me to work with AI tools to create virtually anything. Layers in Photoshop allowed me to work on different elements of an image independently instead of the photo as a whole. We also used the Blending filter, which made it easier to merge different elements smoothly. I feel like I am making good progress in using Firefly and Photoshop together. I took a digital media class during my freshman year of high school, so I have a very brief familiarity with Photoshop and Adobe products. At first, the AI-generated content was hard to work with because I couldn't figure out what I needed to change for it to produce what I wanted, but after experimenting, I got better at refining my prompts. Compared to when I first started using Photoshop, I now feel more comfortable working with AI tools and incorporating them into my designs. Using Firefly in Photoshop is more complex than working with simpler design programs like Canva. However, Firefly’s AI features offer more than Canvas does, as you still have to add and change so much with Canva designs instead of just producing what you want from Firefly. The hardest part is understanding how layers, blending modes, and AI-generated content work together. Unlike drag-and-drop design tools like in Canva, Photoshop requires more precision and knowing shortcuts and controls, which makes it more challenging. One of the challenges I faced this week was when Firefly didn’t generate exactly what I wanted, so I had to make multiple adjustments. Even though AI tools made creating images faster, I still had to manually refine my work to get a polished final product in Photoshop. Despite these challenges, I learned a lot. AI is a great tool for creativity, but human input is still needed to perfect the final result. Proper layer management is important for staying organized, and learning which layer needs to be on top, etc, is also extremely important and something I've learned. Overall, this week was a great learning experience. I gained a better understanding of Firefly’s features, improved my Photoshop skills, and became more confident in using AI-powered design tools. I’m excited to continue learning and exploring more advanced techniques in the future. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FMX210_Blog1_03/27_SMiller

  Weekly Blog Post 1 - 3/24 - 3/28 This week, we focused on gathering pictures for our logo project and working on our first deliverable. The goal was to find pictures that represent the five words we chose to describe ourselves and then narrow them down to three words that we connect with the most. This process helped give me a clearer direction for my designs. In addition to selecting images for our words, we also had to find materials for four other stylescapes—audience, typography, colors, and different logo marks and symbols. To find our images, we used a mix of online sources like Unsplash and the Adobe Stock Library, along with photos we took ourselves. This made the project more personal and fun because I got to look through my camera roll and find pictures that didn’t seem important before but now connect to my words like creative, loyal, and thoughtful. It was interesting to see how old photos could inspire my design. Looking for the right images also made me think more a...
Read more

FMX210_Blog1_02/27_SMiller

This week, I kept working on my calligram project in Adobe Illustrator. I focused on tracing different sections where I wanted to place words and learned how to use Envelope Distort – Make with Top Object to shape the text. By Tuesday, I had a black-and-white draft, but there is still a lot I need to improve before the final version is due next Tuesday. Adobe Illustrator is a program used to create illustrations and designs. This week, I used it to manipulate text and fit it into specific areas of my calligram. This process required a lot of precision and adjusting, which made it more challenging than other projects I’ve worked on. One of the main tools I learned was Envelope Distort – Made with Top Object. This tool allows text to take the shape of the object I created using the pen tool, which is the main part of my calligram design. My biggest struggle has been getting the text to fit exactly right within the shapes I created with the pen tool. It takes a lot of trial and error, and...
Read more

FMX210_Blog1_04/03_SMiller

  This past week, we worked on creating our stylescapes, first on paper and then using a digital template in Adobe Illustrator. The goal was to gather and organize our best and favorite images that represent different aspects of what we want our logo to represent. We focused on five areas: colors, fonts, audience, typography, and my chosen descriptive words; loyal, thoughtful, and creative. Putting together the stylescape was a fun process because I got to see my logo really coming together for the first time. For colors, I picked my top 4 favorite colors, and for descriptive words, I picked my top 2 or 3 from each word. I was drawn to really similar fonts like STARDOM so a lot of my fonts have the same visual design. For the audience, I pulled stock images of celebrities, clients, and people interviewing me, all people who would potentially see my logo. Seeing everything come together on the digital template gave my vision life and gave me a better understanding of the overall dir...
Read more