Subtitles of the Movie

As well as an HTML editor and an FTP client, you’re probably going to need some way of manipulating the graphics that you intend to place on your website. This is obviously not mandatory, you can get fully finished graphics from just about anywhere on the Internet, from clip art to photo galleries all the way up to copying and pasting other peoples images off their website which I don't recommend because I’m not allowed to, However you’re probably going to want some way of manipulating them yourself, you’re probably going to want some kind of graphics program. These are the things that you’re probably going to want to do with a graphics package. Firstly image manipulation and what am I talking about there? Well you might want to change the color depth of the image. What does that mean? If a jpeg or a gif or a bitmap or something is rendered in 16 million colors, you might want to reduce the file size by changing the color depth down from 16 million colors to 256 colors, maybe down to 16 colors or perhaps even to black and white, which is just 2 colors. Hopefully any decent graphics package will allow you to do that. You might want to rotate the image, resize the image, perhaps flip it, mirror it or something like that. You might want to change the brightness or the contrast; the histogram is adjusting the red, green, blue spread of the colors for the optimum look of the picture. You might want to manipulate individual pixels by themselves in the picture. This can involve changing the color of individual pixels, drawing lines free hand, perhaps filling entire areas with one color, that kind of stuff. You'd also want to hope that they would provide the ability to actually draw your own drawings into the image. You can draw rectangles and special shapes and fill them in and so forth with various colors. You would want to have hopefully some kind of special effects packages; you'd want to be able to soften photos if they have harsh edges, you'd want to perhaps convert a photograph into what might look like a charcoal drawing or a pencil drawing. You might want to air brush certain blemishes out of the picture such as cracks and folds and stains and so forth not to mention blemishes on peoples faces of course. You might want to reduce red eye or you might want to make some ones teeth whiter or something like that. You'd want to be able to add text to the picture, you'd want to be able to add borders to the picture and of course you'd want to be able to convert the image from one format to the other, for example a bitmap to a jpeg or a jpeg to a gif or a tiff to a bitmap or something like that. Now none of these features with the possible exception of the special effects is particularly sophisticated. Most simple graphics packages offer these and the truly professional graphics packages offer quite a lot more such as 3d effects, animation and so on. I'll just give you some brief examples of what I’m talking about. I would like to show you the industry standard program, which is Adobe Photoshop but I can’t afford it, I don't have it but if you’re looking for the absolutely creme de la creme of software image packages out there at the moment you would do well to invest in Photoshop, but I will show you some of the photos, sorry, some of the image packages that I have got. I’ll start with the one that comes with Windows, you know what I am talking about, yes, of course its Microsoft's Paint and here we are. This is Microsoft Paint, it's not too bad for what it offers, it’s fairly simplistic but it does do some reasonably useful things. You’re looking at a photograph of Emerald Lake, which is up in Canada where I spent my holidays last Christmas with my fiancé. The reason that the photo looks so crappy is because we’re viewing this in 256-color resolution, that's not my screen, that's the movie format, the QuickTime movie has been rendered in 256 colors so as to save space on the cd or download time on the Internet. The photo is actually considerably nicer than that; anyway, let’s have a look at this paint program. We can play with the colors, we can do things to the image, we can rotate it and flip it, we can probably change the size of the image. We can obviously do all these things down here, we can apply colors to certain areas, air brush over certain areas, add certain different shapes, we can even add text with all of these different colors down here at our disposal. This is obviously not a tutorial in Microsoft Paint so I won't want to spend any more time on it, I'll move on to another package that I have available. Here is the same photograph loaded into Jasc Paint Shop Pro, which is considered by many to be the premier shareware image-editing program which means it is downloadable from the Internet. You can use it for certain amount of time and I think it's a month or two after which time you have to buy it. It’s trying very hard to mimic all the features of Photoshop or at least a lot of them whilst being only a fraction of the cost. Photoshop I think runs at around 600 dollars or something to that effect and Paint Shop Pro is only about 100 dollars and it’s got a vast array of tools that you can play with. There's all the different things that you can do to the colors. You can create your own images, not photographs but you can create your own designed images and comprise them of several layers, several objects. The effects are quite nice, I might just show you an example of an effect. I go down to texture effects, try sand stone, say OK. and that's just one of the thousands of different effects that you can get in Paint Shop Pro and so on. We will talk a little bit more about graphic packages in one of the other modules in this chapter because there are some other things that you’re probably going to be want to be able to do that are particularly relevant to websites. We'll talk about those shortly.