Saturday, March 16, 2013

Photoshop: My Enemy, My Friend

Recently, I subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud service which gives me access to all 17 of their powerful programs for $30 a month. I can't even tell you the amount of excitement I got from having all that creative power at my fingertips. Now I wasn't stuck with using Paint for all my creative endeavors, and I would produce brilliant pieces of concept art for my hard-working team at Frogdice.

Look at the difference between my concept art!

No, I'm just kidding. I really wish that was how it turned out. (I borrowed the turtoom from our 3D Artist, Adam.) Instead, I got Photoshop and couldn't figure out how to make a circle. Well, that's not really true either. I made a circle, and I was pretty excited about it. I got up to get a drink, and when I got back, my circle was gone. I never did figure out where it went or how it disappeared.

Now, of course, I'm much more comfortable with Photoshop. I'm still not doing anything super beautiful with it, but I did make the title to this blog. I have to say that I felt incredibly proud of it. Of course, Photoshop turned around and kicked me in the teeth the day after I finished my Frog Pond title. I ended up pasting 400 codes into a template in Photoshop and saving each page as an individual file in preparation for PAX East. Photoshop had a great laugh at me then.

Photoshop, sometimes friend. Sometimes enemy.

3 comments:

Deborah MacArthur said...

This article is timely. I spend a lot of time on Librarything.com organizing my lists of books and each book normally has a lovely thumbnail of the cover art. Some books have several different covers to choose from,if it has been reprinted more than once. A few books however, especially very old or obscure ones have no cover available and I make it my personal quest to find a suitable cover, usually using google images. But I have made three covers all on my own using paint. It's truly pathetic how poorly I utilize what must be a terrific tool in the hands of an expert. Usually I get better with time and experience on any program but let's face it,Paint has been around since my very first PC back when MSN was all there was (AOL was the new kid on the block.
I can use it. I can achieve workable results. I still suck at it.

Unknown said...

I love Photoshop! For Christmas, Tim bought me a Groupon for 4 Adobe courses. One was Photoshop and I already took it. Fun class. The others were Flash, Digital Photography and Website Design with Dreamweaver.

All 4 courses with the Groupon were $100.

If you don't want to spend the money for that one, it was pretty in-depth and covered a lot of ground, you might try Udemy for free online instruction.

Sometimes I learn better by just hunting and clicking, but Udemy is pretty detailed. I looked at their Java programming course for some training for junior programmers and the topics (many of them) were pretty comprehensive....and FREE.

Have fun! I was so happy to be able to finally do some of my photo touching in Photoshop. I'm with you, I used to slave over Paint just to get a graphic I needed to turn out right, which they never really did. :D

Unknown said...

I forgot to leave the link for Udemy.