Graphic design/photo editing question

Hi,

any graphic designers on here? I have a question about editing an image for a poster that I wanted to run by someone. It shouldn't take much time

Might be able to help, I say might because you haven't really said what your trying to do.

What is it that you need help with?

Basically I am creating a poster as part of a course I am doing, I have purchased a stock image of someone looking through a window. I would like to superimpose an image of prison type bars on the window, alternatively I may use a drawing program to draw some bars on? If that makes any sense! However in that case I'm not sure which program is best and how to make sure it looks professional and neat etc. Thank you in advance for any advice

You could do it in Photoshop or Illustrator. With Photoshop what you could do is get an image of some prison bars and then erase the space between the bars and place this on top of the image you have purchased. The result is that the person would be visible in the space you have made between the bars. Hope that makes sense. You could also try to draw bars in Photoshop but it wouldn't be worth the hassle as drawing in it is a pain.

If you want to create a drawing then use Illustrator. You can create shading using gradients to create the illusion of 3D bars. Illustrator has many tools in it some similar to what you can do in Photoshop like the ability to create Transparency and blur. It also worth mention that you can copy and paste something you have drawn from Illustrator to Photoshop as a "Smart Object", this is really useful if you plan on editing what you have drawn in Photoshop.

Drawing the bars in Illustrator might be quicker depending on what look you want to achieve.

You say you want it to look professional but unless this is for a design course then I suspect you might get away with less than perfect as long as it was good enough and got the message across.

Just out of interest what course is it that you are studying? And have you used Photoshop or Illustrator before? Or any other design program?

Thanks for your reply. I'm studying Nursing! So have never used a design program before (I'm sure Paint doesn't count )

Ideally what I would like to achieve is a 'neat' look but it should look like it has been superimposed if you know what I mean, so that you can tell it is 'imaginary' prison bars. Would be great if they had a lock on them too!

I will have a look at images but isn't it going to be difficult to a) erase the spaces, and b) fit the shape of the bars into the window and bypass the people and any other objects in the image?

This might be beyond your skills then if you have never used a design program before. It is possible to do what you want but it might be better to get someone else to do it. Where you are studying do you have any design students, maybe one of them could help?

Not really, I am going to have to try and do it myself - I've thought of a fairly simple way - as long as I don't make too much of a pig's ear of erasing some spaces! Thanks for that idea, I'd have struggled to think of another way of doing it. Just hope it will work!

Now youve got a few software titles to have a go at, have a look on youtube - there will be a lots of tutorials about cropping and image manipulation.

Option B is to get another image with bars already on the window or pre-cut out prison bars.

well, superimposing the bars isn't working as well as I thought. They need to be blown up to fit the other image and it's making them pixelated! (I am not paying another tenner for a pic of some bars lol!)

The only other option, bar (pardon the pun!) drawing the bars on top of the photo (which I have tried and looks rubbish!) is to cut out some bars and plonk them on top, then photograph the finished image (although needs to be done with a decent camera I imagine!)

I don't know why I ever thought this was going to be easy

Can you email me the image so I can have a look?

Opening up an image in paint and drawing some lines over the top should work. The bars probably wont look shiney but hey will be straight (ive tried photographing stuff in lieu of a scanner - ver yhard)

yes no problem! I can't email you Love2print, could you pm me your email address please??

---------- Post added 22-05-2017 at 12:20 ----------

Tinfoil stuff, that was my first attempt! it did look pretty rubbish I have to say, but may revert to that if I can't get another way to do it! thank you for the suggestion!