Color Testing Update

It turns out the initial screen I was color testing on had a completely different color profile than most other screens in the office – so while my first round of color edits looked ok to me, the photo highlights looked green or red on most other screens.

 

After talking to some LAITS people who knew more about the screens’ color profiles, I stopped playing with hue/saturation and brightness/contrast settings. The screens don’t get “brighter” per say, because pure white/”brightness” only appears as blue. I used a tan and black gradient map and lowered the green/blue highlights and raised red highlights in curves to achieve this effect. The contrast is also nicer on camera now. Knowing how tricky color balancing a neutral like this is on the screens I’m happy with these results!

 

McCombs

The McCombs graphics team sent over assets they’d like to be used for the online courses. My job now is to take their templates and edit them for each class. One major concern is color correcting. LAITS courses are filmed in a studio with a digital monitor backing the professor. While this allows each course to easily look different, filming a digital screen often leads to color issues like in the image below. Understandably McCombs wants to stick to their color palette, so I’ve been working on color correcting the images to come out looking “right” on camera.

 

This burnt orange and white image looks brown and light blue on camera.

 

 

Here are my files:

The color corrected ones look salmon-colored on a computer screen, but as you can see in the images I took from the studio they end up looking tan on camera. I did 5 of these.

Photo IDs

Today I tried out some new techniques when it comes to color correcting.

VLabs Last Looks, Final Stages

VLabs (Virtual Laboratories of Anthropology online) is due ~the end of November. It’s serious crunch time and there’s a lot left to do. Unfortunately with the tight deadline we have to ditch a lot of stylistic issues and focus on getting everything on the site with accurate info. It was a sad day for the designers.

 

 

I’m training Thuy and Abriella how to do Last Looks, which Olivia and I split into 2 rounds: content accuracy and student experience. We picked them because they both have a great eye for detail. After, Olivia and I will do a final sweep and fix all the problems they found in each lab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left to do:

• 8 PSDs yet to be made (that we know of, we find 1-2 new ones per lab during Last Looks)
• 30 PSDs awaiting review
• 11 interactives ready to be assembled
• 5 interactives with major problems
• all 12 labs for last looks!!!

 

 

McCombs

We met with the McCombs team last week to go over design options and settled on some new ideas. We decided the wall monitor behind the prof should be a photo of McCombs, since its less jarring than a lot of text. The photo I chose is not 100% cohesive with the rest of the theme, but I am really waiting on McCombs’ feedback.

 

 

I created Powerpoint templates, Canvas graphics, and an opening animation idea for each video. This is my first project working directly with clients at LAITS so I’m learning a lot about how in-person client comm works.

Geography Flyer

Had a very quick turnaround with this badboy (two hours!) but sometimes that’s what it takes in the Biz. This was a perfect chance to use my favorite graphic element: the topographic map. Used colors from a previous LAITS graphic for the Geography department, and used photos provided by the client.