Photoshop 101

[mercurychkita]

Tonight I decided I would try to teach myself how to use Photoshop. Until now, I've had this really weird way of (very poorly) manipulating images, that involved cropping and adding text in Word (seriously), the print screen button, and then pasting into Paint. My ghetto method was right up there with creative ways to use duct tape

Comments

[revolos55]

Hehe. Thanks. Both the Willow/Tara ones were very early animation attempts.

And the Hex one actually won an award. I seem to get more awards for humorous icons than I do for "serious artistic" icons. *shrug*

For adjusting coloring I suggest messing with brightness/contrast, levels, hue/saturation, and color balance. That's actually the majority of the image editing I do. And the way I do textures is to paste one image on top of the other and then adjust the opacity. Sometimes the texture image is on top, sometimes not, whichever looks better.

For animation I use Jasc Animation Shop 3. I started out with the free trial, but used it so much that when it expired I bought it. Some image quality loss does happen once you animate, but the biggest problem with animation is the 40 kb limit on LJ. *shakes fist angrily*.

For example, these are the icons I wanted:




These are the icons I had to settle for:




You have to sacrifice size, time, and image quality, all of which are adjustable inside the program. Otherwise, at least for static icons, I save as jpgs at the maximum quality allowed by Photoshop (12) and I've never had one over 40kb.