Technical Elements - Editing

Editing is the main reason as to how we have amazing films and advertisements not only for films but for pretty much every product that is used on a daily basis. Editing allows the user to completely take a series of video clips or still images and completely alter them in a series of different ways to create a fully finished overall product, these products can some times be informative for example advertisements or posters on cancer research or other NHS related products.

 This image you see was once just a simple image of a young girl, witht the use of editing however the user has managed to create a effective poter that trys to convey that smoking is bad and doesnt just effect you but also those around you. the user has created a series of layers, one for the young girl, one for the smoke you see circling her head, a layer for the text in the middle and finally the logo of the child health foundation is placed on its own layer and is located in the bottom right of the advertisement.

Examples of Tools and Techniques when editing
Layers- Layers allow you to work with multiple different parts of a project at the same time, Adobe Photoshop has the best example of layers as you have the ability to use multiple tools within the seperate layers without editing the others which is incredibly useful if you are working on something in depth that has multiple levels to them and you only want to edit a small part of it without disturbing the other parts of it.

Cropping- Cropping allows you to simply just shorten an image or take out a specific part of an image and incorporate it into something else. Cropping is availble on every form of editing software.

Text- The text tool allows you to simply apply text into a document wherever you want it. There is pretty much an unlimted amount of font and sizes to use when editing which is incredibly useful if you are creating a poster or something that requires a lot of text that is also very profesional.

Magic Wand- The Magic Wand Tool is one of the oldest selection tools in Photoshop. Unlike other selection tools that select pixels in an image based on shapes or by detecting object edges, the Magic Wand selects pixels based on tone and color.

Eraser- Eraser is just a basic tool used to delete any unwanted parts of a specific document, this is a basic tool that is in every editing program and is very basic to use.

Masking- Masking allows the user to crop a specific part of an image then place it over a background that was not part of the original photograph, this technique is normally used when creating a product or an advertising campaign where you would take a product and place it over a funny background to attract attention.

There are different uses of editing take editing videos for example this allows you to show how a person is feeling or the characteristics of that certain character, an example of this would be if someone was in disbelief with the use of editing you can slow down the shot to create tension or worry witht the viewer. Not only can you portray emotion but you can also add effects that could not be possible in real life, for example on an episode of Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia one of the characters is trying to get a television to switch on again by trying to re align the broken wires as he is doing this blue electrical sparks are coming from the wires, this is done via editing as this would be far to dangerous to attempt in real life.

Editing also allows you to incorporate sound into your videos these also link in with what i mentioned before about creating a mood within the video, an example of this would be in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker is about to destroy the deathstar and the iconic music plays to create the sense of action however Luke can not hear the music the only thing he can hear is the sound of gunfire and space ships flying this is what is known as diagetic and non diagetic sounds and is something that is always used in some form in editing.