Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorials

                     As a Photoshop beginner, I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy Photoshop is to pick up and I liked a lot of what I made even if it contained flaws. I learned how to alter a number of images a number of ways. The experience let me see how a lot of graphics are designed and edited to make items more appealing. Below are some tools I learned to use that will help me in this course.

                             

      Content Aware Fill 

With this tool I removed a logo on this surfboard.  The content aware fill is a tool used in conjunction with the lasso and square fill tool. Say for example that a picture has some unwanted background elements or any excessive detailing, and you wanted it gone. This is where that tool would be used. You simply take the lasso or square fill tool and use it outline the part of the image you want gone and go to the appropriate menu panel and press content aware fill and apply. The fill samples other areas to create a fill that covers the unwanted space with an almost seamless replica.

   
Clone Stamp

                          The clone stamp is used in situations where the patch tool fill will not be of much use because the area needing cleaning is much too small. This will be best used in an area where a graphic or blemish is placed and cannot be efficiently removed. To use, select the brush and then find an area that is similar to the area round the unwanted body. Then press option and click to sample an area and the area will clone itself wherever you put the brush making a similar copy over whatever you need gone. I used this tool to cover a set of clothing tags as you will see in the images above and below.

                                                                                      

                                                                         

        Patch Tool

                             This tool is a fairly simple tool to use in a situation similar to one of the clone stamp, but is easier to use in large areas. The tool is used by outlining an area needing to be patched and moving the outlined piece over a texture used for fill. This will put the filler texture in the place of the other unwanted texture. I used this tool to get rid of a t-shirt logo as shown by the two images.

                         

The last set of tricks and tools I used were to create a photo collage. Many of the tools I used I forgot because the emphasis for the project was in so many places, but a few stuck. The first was the use of a layer mask and how to manipulate other layers. I used this trick to make the sleeves of the center girl in black longer and also to give more consistency to the center image. To accomplish this you first make a layer mask and then erase the parts you want seen and unseen by using black and white paint. Black takes pieces of the layer above and makes them invisible and white does the opposite. The other trick of significance was the use of color hues. By adjusting the hues of layers or layer collections the colors are manipulated allowing unique color schemes. The method of how to do it is still a mystery to me, but with further experimentation I should know more. I used this tool to make the girls in black portrait a shadier feel and color palette.
 

                                           

 Takeaway

                                These lesson helped an enormous amount and I look forward to some freestyle work on improving these skills. In the future I would like to allow myself enough time to complete these projects and to let myself see when the project is done to it's fullest, as perfection is not achievable. I hope to also gain more knowledge in my next set of tutorials!