Sunday, March 14, 2010

Photoshop aka Workhorse


When I started my Graphic Design classes I had a great instructor teach me the value of Adobe's software program, Illustrator. Often you will find designers who like/prefer Illustrator. However, through various classes and the Internet I have found the true value in Photoshop, another of Adobe's Creative Suite programs. Let me tell you, these programs to the average Joe are very pricey! But a worthy investment, and students get a crazy deal! Anyway, there are tons of free resources online to make all the different programs easier and more fun to use. I downloaded a ton of "actions" for Photoshop and today I made time to play with them. These are basically a series of steps that someone completed in photoshop. Photoshop has the power to record each step you do, then save the series as a single 'action'. The reason this is nice, is if you do a project, with a ton of different steps, you can save a ton of time later, by doing that same series of steps on another project. Since most of the work is done with photos, these actions are great, because they take the guesswork out of giving an artistic look to your photos.

So I took the above photo of Luke yesterday. He had "Shark Boy" hair. (Yes, that is Taylor Laughtner, AKA Jacob Black)

Then did these different effects. Which do you like the best?
1

2

3

4

5


I really like the one below, his eyes look amazing!
But the ones above are more artistic, and I really
like number 4.



If you have some pictures you've taken that you really like but would love to see jazzed up, let me know, and for a very reasonable fee, I will let Photoshop earn its rent on my Mac and make your cute pictures even better. Just drop me an email at becca henrie @ yahoo dot com (no spaces) and we can talk.

4 comments:

Brooke said...

Loving #2 and 4!! So fun, I need to get online and learn more about photoshop. I'm pretty good with the basics but I need to spend more time learning new things!!
Great Job..I like the boldness of the last one too!!

Lucy said...

I found a site a couple of years ago that had the freaking coolest actions ever. But, I couldn't use them without the software, wish I could remember!!

wendy said...

I love what you have done with the photos. My PSCS3 doesn't work on my laptop with Vista :(. I need to work with my desktop more and play with the photo's.

AMIT said...
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