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A2 - Working with Graphics

In this assignment, we will look at a couple of common tasks you might carry out involving images. If this type of software interests you, consider taking our Media Arts course!

Folder Setup

In your Google Drive folder for this class, create a subfolder called Unit 3. Put all your files from this assignment into that folder.

Part A - Background Removal Using Gimp

Gimp is a free graphics editor - similar to PhotoShop but more basic.

Often you may want to paste something like a logo into a presentation or other document, and it can be annoying when you have the original background colour surrounding the image you want. Today I will show you how we can solve this.

Click here for a video going through this process - you can refer to this if you forget any steps. In the video, I ommitted a lot of the keyboard shortcuts so that it was clear what I was doing, but you might want to get used to these:

  • CTRL+C - Copy
  • CTRL+V - Paste
  • CTRL+A - Select All

Your Task - Part A

Remove the background from three logos, and paste the logos into a Google Slides document that contains a background colour.

Extension - once you have your logo in Gimp, try some of the filters to alter your logo.

Part B - Diagrams and Incremental Saves

A good free program for creating diagrams is draw.io. You will download a portable version of this, and then I'm going to leave it to you to figure out using whatever resources you choose.

Download this file and unzip it (right-click then Extract All...). Inside the folder that gets extracted, open the program draw.io.exe (you might not see the exe part).

There are two goals to this assignment.

Before you start...

Make sure you've read and understood both goals, particularly the second, as you will be achieving these simultaneously

Goal #1

Using whatever learning resources you would like, your end goal should be to reproduce the following diagram as closely as possible.

Goal #2

When I check this, I'd like to see five incremental saves. That means you are going to use the Save As... options five times. Name your files in a meaningful way, such as diagram v1.drawio, diagram v2.drawio, etc.