For the web unit and the markdown unit, I used technologies I felt very comfortable with. Once I began editing images, though, I realized that I had a lot of room for improvement. Initially, I thought I could get by with the basics of photoshop that I already knew about. I played around with it before, so I was familiar with the basic tools and the concepts of layers. Most of what I did before this class involved cutting out pictures with the magic wand tool and reordering them. I have also played around with the liquefy tool, but that turns out to not be very practical in most situations.
I used photoshop for the first time in several years during the dog meme tutorial. It was such a simple example, but I realized how overwhelmed I was with the possible menu options. There seemed to be about 7 different ways to go about doing any given task, but I couldn’t always figure it out. The planet tutorial felt like a significant step forward in difficulty. Although I learned a lot, there were a lot of tools that I can’t remember how to use.
If I ever want to truly be good at photoshop, I feel that there are two main skills I need to pick up. First of all, I need to have an arsenal of tools that I am familiar with so that I can use the right tool in the right scenario. Second of all, I need to have good artistic spacial awareness. Art has never come naturally to me, and a lot of the skills involved in drawing/painting appear to translate well to photoshop. Ultimately, though, I learned a lot from the unit. I think my skills are now at a point where I would feel comfortable doing basic photo editing.
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