Criterion C: Product Creation

Firstly, what I did was search for pictures on Google Images of swimmers or sportspeople that were posing in such a position that I could use them as a front cover model for the headphones on my magazine, and so that I could build the product around them. These were a few pictures I considered:

I chose this one, seeing as it was a close-up image of the swimmer’s head, allowing me to model the headphones in detail and slightly bigger than they could’ve fit on another one of the swimmers in other pictures. Also, the angle that the headphones would fit on her head would allow me to display majority of its features on the side with the most prominent functions of the headphones. In addition to this, seeing as the product is aimed mainly for synchronised swimmers who are typically female, having a female model would help attract the target audience’s attention

Next, I found a few different types of headphones that I could use as a template to build the advanced features of my design on. Here are a few of the options I looked at:

I experimented with a few of the headphones on the model, and finally chose the lime one, because it looks very realistic and the green suits the cool-coloured theme of the background picture. I superimposed the images of the headphones onto the model using the app ‘P-Blender Lite’. It allows you to import photos, remove background using two different tools (one a colour remover, and the other an erasing marker that you can adjust the span of and guide using your own fingers to erase the specific parts of an image that you wish to remove), rotate the image, and then import another photo of your choice behind the foreground photo and adjust position of. I inserted the pair of headphones I wanted ‘on top’ of the model’s head by in fact removing its background and then inserting the model behind it. I then spent a little time readjusting the photo behind the headphones and clearly remove-backgrounding the edges to make it look a little more professional.

Then, I used an app on my iPad named ‘Frames Delight’. It is a photo-editing app that allows you to adjust features of a photo such as brightness, colour contrast, saturation, warmth and etc. I utilised it to adjust the photo so that the edges of where I ‘photoshopped’ in the headphones onto the picture blended naturally and the picture didn’t look fake but instead realistic, as if the image were taken with the swimmer actually wearing the headphones.

Readjusting the photo required for me to increase its warmth, meaning that although the editing is well disguised, the photo colour quality is poor as that made it a bit yellow. I imported this photo into an app called ‘PicArt’, in which I added a mild filter to the picture to bring out its cooler-based colour scheme.

Next, I imported the photo back into ‘P-Blender Lite’ and used the marker tool in a medium size to remove the center bit of the earmuffs on the headphones that held the Beats logo – now this leaves me space to build the screen of my product on the headphone after imported it to my laptop.

 Before continuing on to work on my laptop to finish creating the product, I did one more thing. I needed to find an image for the screen of my headphones – their design was fairly similar to that of an iPhone screen, except they had a voluem icon where the home button is. So, using an iPhone image that I found on Google Images, I imported it into ‘P-Blender Lite’ and then used the large size marker tool in order to remove the area where the home button was and then inserted a volume icon behind it, adjusting it so that it fit into the image perfectly, while at the same time blending in well due to the faded, soft edges that the marker tool offered.

 After importing both these images onto my laptop and into Microsoft Word, I positioned the edited iPhone image on top of the headphones where it’s supposed to be, then rearranged the pictures so that the iPhone was behind the headphones, showing through the transparent part that I removed, and so that the pictures were layered on top of one another perfectly.

Finally, to finish off the product, I downloaded four images of the icons that wee to be displayed on the app screen along with the ‘song option’ icons such as pause, play, stop, fast-forward and rewind played around with them for a bit, rotating and resizing them so that they all fit on the screen, and then finally grouping all of the pictures together to create one larger picture of the product as a whole.