Post Production Technology-Serif DrawPlus X5

The programme I used to create my two ancillary tasks was Serif DrawPlus X5. It is a programme used for artistic creations and is a programme I have used before on tasks unrelated to media but because I have experience on it, I believed it to be my best choice to get the best result I could as it provides more options to me than a programme such as publisher, although some of the tools on Serif DrawPlus X5, I do find hard to handle accurately.

One such tool is the cutout studio which is used to blade out the back ground of an image and is more accurate than a simple "remove background" option as it allows you to pick and choose exactly what you want cut out by drawing around it, making it much more flexible.

Another tool that I used was the shadow tool that enables you to easily add in shadow effects to objects in your work. I applied a shadow to the picture of Shaun after brightening the background image centre to give the appearance that a light is shining on him. I achieve this by using the shadow tool to first apply the shadow and then change the size and position to make it look more realistic as if the light is shining from an angle.

There are also simple tools that are used easily like the artistic text tool and the crop tool as I have used this before on other programmes such as Microsoft office word as they are universal tools. The other main tool I used however was the the Photo lab. Photo lab enables you to apply filters to your pictures and it allows you to mix and match them to create various effects and then further change the colours and shades around to make it more unique. For instance here I simply changed the colour of this wall to various shades of grey.

However I did use a more advanced aspect of the programme which was the mask tool in photo lab. This enabled me to create the colour contrast of the rose and Shaun in the poster as it enables me to accurately select which parts of the photo require a filter and which parts remain in colour much like how the cut out studio works which allows for transferable skills.