In April I began taking an Introductory Photoshop class. Now I’ve been “playing” with Photoshop for years and achieving “ok” results. However… I discovered two things – 1) No one really ever masters Photoshop (“playing” was a good description for my Photoshop skills prior to this class) and 2) Photoshop CS3 Extended is amazing! For our final we needed to submit a 9.5” wide by 7” tall book cover. We were to use as many techniques as reason in our design submission. Here’s what I submitted: The biggest challenges with this project were 1) deciding on a layout and 2) choosing the photographs. I started out trying to force fit five band photos into a layout I’d seen in a direct mailer. After a couple of hours struggling, I started fresh – well almost fresh two of the original photos survived. I used the following five photographs to create my collage. Angie and Rachel, February 2007 gig at Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco The Band, April 2007 gig at Blackthorn Pub in San Francisco The Ba...

Week 7 of our Photoshop class had us working with layer effects and text. The assignment was to create a CD cover. As my PC had just died, I didn't have Livewire photos at my fingertips - just the photos from our trip up to Sonoma over Memorial Day. I decided to create a CD cover for a digital portfolio. I wanted to create a warm image with a romantic feel. I created the cover from three photographs: a garden statue, roses over a fence post, and a peacock. An immediate challenge faced by the selection of these photos was the lighting - the statue is in the shade, the flowers are in the bright afternoon sun. As the lesson for the week had focused on layer effects the range of lighting should be easy to address. I started with the image of the statue and increased the canvas size to create the white space on the left. To create the romantic feel I wanted, I created a new layer and added a vector mask to the right side of the photo. I set the layer style to Hue and then played with th...

This week's Photoshop assignment had us learning how to use quick masks and stored selections. The assignment was simple - using a mask create a new background for two parrots. Now I'm not one to do anything "simply" and this assignment was no exception. We were provided an image for the foreground (an image of two parrots). I supplemented this image with two of my photographs - one of a closeup of a pair of flowers and one of a bed of tulips. My photographs were taken at the Elizabeth Gamble Gardens in Palo Alto, CA earlier this year. I've included the two original photographs. Can you guess how many clipping masks I used in this assignment? Hint... it wasn't one or even two.

Recently in my Photoshop class, we learned about clipping masks using objects and type. I'd just returned from the Artichoke Festival in Castroville where we saw a sampling of old crate labels. For my creative project, I was inspired to design a label for an event photo album. The image I submitted for my assignment is at the top on the right. I started with two separate photos to create the label - one of an old produce truck and one of a crate of artichokes. For submission we were required to show the layers we used. The screenshot shows the ordering of the various components used to create the submitted image. The Layers palette doesn't show the opacity or the blending mode. I discovered that I didn't need the black layers for the text. I'd accidentally created the text in the same color as the label background. When I generated the label, I didn't like the look of the queen's straight edge versus the arched text. After some more tweaking, I came up with the ...