Activity 3.4 - Illustrated Sunflower Haiku

I decided to use a photo I had of the sunflowers fields near the village of Le Fossat where I am living. My concept was to work on this photo turning it from colour to B&W to illustrate the change of seasons so beloved of us haiku poets.

The Image: The problem was that the screen shot of the haiku did not have the transparency I wanted so spent ages retyping the entire haiku in PS as a text layer. [ Bonus mark deserved here :-}} ] Next, I took a photo of sunflowers I had, cropped and saved it as a GIF. I then pasted it in as a layer, which was duplicated. The duplicated image was desaturated to become B&W. I then applied a gradient so the upper (colour) layer faded to reveal the B&W image below. Some fiddling with curves and opacity was required to achieve the desired effect. The text was the top layer and I changed alignment to left to suit the composition – this would not have been possible as a graphic. Having saved, I then flattened the image and made a final crop to reduce size, and saved for web as a GIF using ImageReady (in PS) which brought it down to 77k. which is well within specs.

What I have learned: Planning ahead would have helped re: transparency. However, I have not found a way to make GIFs transparent and a GIF was required for 3.2. Never the less I could have started 3.2 in PS and saved using projects. The font worked well against the backgrounds so should be suitable for the animation I have in mind for 3.6.