I think I mentioned that I was going to be taking a couple of Photoshop classes. Today was the first class. We started the class by drawing a simple picture of a house. He walked us through different tools on the tool pallet and showed how they worked. I was ok here as I’ve used Photoshop a little in the past.

One of the activities that we did that was really fun was to take a picture of a man and dress him with items from his wardrobe file. We added hats, glasses, jackets, and ties to the original image and then resized each object so it would fit properly. We then grouped that outfit into a folder called Costume1 and turned off the layer. Then, he had us create another costume for him. Fun stuff! It was like playing dress up on a Ken doll only we were doing it digitally.

For our final project, we needed to make a collage.

I started with an image of longbeach from pdpdphogo.org:

Then, I did a few things and presto…here are smaller versions of what I created today:


You’ll notice on this first one, I adjusted the color levels. I also added text in two different layers and then that picture of me where I added a “stroke” border from the color of the sky.


On this image, I changed the colors of the original image even more to a striking blue. I added the stars (photoshop brush) with a shadow and another effect and I can’t remember. Also, the image of me now is black and white and has a black border, which coincides with the extra black building I added to the image.

So, among other things, I can:

  1. add things to pictures (say extra water)
  2. take things out of pictures using the magic lasso
  3. make things different colors by a couple different methods
  4. touch up an old photo
  5. colorize an old photo
  6. take out red eye
  7. blur the background of a photo

Fun stuff! It was a great way to spend the day and earn a credit hour. It’s Art 1400 if you’re local and would like to take it.