Week 6

Terry Grogan

Ah, the last week of class! I'm way behind due to family needs (yes, real life got in the way). I enjoyed this class. I learned a lot about Photoshop. There are things it does really well - better than PaintShop Pro, but there are things that are much easier in PSP - like being able to copy a picture as a new image without having to open a new image first.

Anyway, on to the lessons.

Here are the Easter Eggs in Photoshop CS2 - something I upgraded to in the middle of this lesson - another thing that slowed me down just a bit.

This one comes by holding down the CTRL and ALT keys while choosing HELP>About Photoshop

This one comes by choosing the Text tool, clicking on the icon to toggle between Character and Paragraph, typing in a font you have on your PC (e.g. Veranda) and immediately typing francis after that.

This is the old image fixed up, on the left, and with a sepia tone added, on the right. I liked the patch tool - that was really handy. I like PSP's scratch removal tool much better than Photoshop's healing tool. (click on the image to open the full size picture)

On the left is a picture my dad took in 1962 of me, my brother, and my younger sister. I applied a sepia tone to it. On the right is a picture I took in 2003 of 2 of my nieces and my dog. It was a color photo that I turned to grayscale and then applied a bluish tint to it. (click on the image to open the full size picture)

Here's the last lesson. This is what took me the longest - I'm just not very creative, so I couldn't get "inspired" to do anything. I decided to post this as the full image rather than a thumbnail, because I put a lot of effort into it.

First, I took the image I had of the Hummel, which had a brown background. I applied a Gaussian blur, then used the smudge tool to "mix it all up". I then applied the Gaussian blur - this is what gave me by background layer.

I then took 4 images that I cut out of their backgrounds - an old camera, my husband holding a coin, the Hummel, and a cast iron bank and applied then to background on their own separate layer. (on the coin, I used the healing brush to take out a few "nicks" that were visible). For each image, I used the free transform tool to rotate and size it to something I liked.

I then took each image and applied a different blend method (e.g. screen, soft light) and also a different opacity and fill setting until I found something pleasing for each. The text was done by adding text, copying part of my background and layering it on top the text, clipping that background to the text layer (a cool trick, I will use a lot!), then applying a drop shadow and blend emboss to the text layer.

Lastly, I merged the entire image, then applied an artistic filter effect called "film grain"