Blog # 2 - My Photoshop Experiences So far

Wow - I never thought you would be able to do so much so easily with this Photoshop tool. To date I am completely overwhelmed with what we have covered in class. Staying up with Fawn as she does things in Photoshop and trying to take notes at the same time is quite a chore. One thing I have found is that graduating from college over 30 years ago, my note taking has become very bad.

Another sad realization I have come to is that you can drive your self crazy trying to remember every step you did in class creating an image. The concept of layers is very cool. And I love the history browser. I make a ton of mistakes and it is great to be able to drop back past the one level of undo to the last good image or to the starting point (I do this often!). The guys that wrote the Photoshop software were top-notch and on the ball ( a plug from an old has-been programmer ).

Selecting the images I have used so far is very easy for me. I have been taking digital pictures for many years. The neatest thing I have done so far is to take three different pictures of the family dogs and pull the image of each dog and put them together into one picture as if I took that picture. I have decided that it is a very good thing that I did not choose being a graphic artist for a career. It is very hard for me to control the lasso while tracing around images.

I would love to learn more about plopping an image into another image and making it seamlessly blend in. Oh - that is this weeks lesson.

The kinds of pictures and images I find interesting all deal with my family, my team, and my students. There is always something you wish you could add or delete from a photograph. For basketball we always take our team picture at the very beginning of the year. last year I had a young man that I had to dismiss from my team for violation of my rules. They would not have a professional photographer retake our team picture so I did it myself. It would have been so nice to just take this one player out of the existing picture. I can do that with Photoshop. I am also always adding text to the team pictures ie; year, names of players, etc. I have always struggled doing this in MS-Paint. Looks to be a lot easier and more flexible to do with Photoshop.