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]

Shiny.

Yeah, all my Photoshop knowledge is self-taught. I make some static icons, but a lot of my stuff is animated, which really kills the image quality. I've got so much envy and respect for people who are good at graphics.

If you have any interst in checking out my stuff, my icon dump post is HERE, and I'd be more than happy to let you know how I pulled something off, if you're curious.

[mercurychkita]

Thanks - LOL I love the Hex icon that says "Boys are gross". And the Willow one to the lyrics of "Weapon". Awesome. As for tips, the first step is for me to learn the basics (I actually spent a good chunk of time last night trying to figure out something as basic as resizing an image - I figured it out... eventually) but then I want to try stuff like adjusting the colouring to get nice bright images from stuff that's washed out, or I don't know, texturing and stuff. Heh. I think the biggest problem is that I don't even know where to begin!

Eventually I'd like to try some animated stuff - I have played around here and there with a GIF animator for work, actually, but I haven't done anything fancy. And then, yeah, figuring out how not to lose all the image quality when you save images as different file types would be a good lesson, too, both for animated stuff as well as still images.

I guess what I probably need to find are some good tutorials - but especially ones that go right back to the basics as well, since I really am a newbie.

[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:

[mercurychkita]

Yup, it's on mine now, too! *grin*

[mercurychkita]

Cool! That would be great, thanks!

Notice I'm making good use of those icons you made me! *grin*

[blue_eyed_devil]

Wow this is really good. Anne is so hot. :) This is going to be my desktop for a few days.

[mercurychkita]

Aw, thanks! Glad you like it!