Tips for photographing Moodboards and preparing them for your presentation.

You have the option of preparing your presentation slides either digitally or through manual layouts that you record photographically and then convert into a digital format. If you are making manual Mood boards here are a few steps you can take to make sure that they look good as presentation slides.
The first of those are in taking the photographs - make sure they are well lit and that you position your camera above the centre of the image to avoid getting a taper distortion, take several photos to ensure you get images with a good sharp focus.

An example of "taper distortion"

Once you have got decent photographs it is usually possible to enhance them in PhotoShop before you transfer them into your presentation. Here is a raw photographic image followed by an edit of the same photo.

To achieve this I did the following:

• Rotated the original image.
• Cropped the image to remove unwanted areas.
• Adjusted brightness and contrast to give the image more on-screen "zip".
• Used the "sharpen more" filter to add crispness to the image.
• Created a new layer, made a rectangular selection and filled this with a pale blue colour, then applied the multiply Layer style to this blue box.
• Using the text tool added notes (in a font downloaded from www.dafont.com). I then used the move tool to place the text over the blue area.
• Finally from the Layer Menu I added a drop shadow to my text from the Layer Style options.

Having done all this I then saved the final image as a jpeg (option available from the dropdown menu when you save in Photoshop). Using jpegs as presentation slides works fine, if you upload .psd PhotoShop documents or high resolution digital photos you may find they slow your presentation down and stop it functioning properly.