Gallery of past work

Friday 3 January 2014

Photoshop play 12

I've spent the last two days trying to load Adobe Photoshop 12 onto my PC - so frustrating. Still I finally succeeded and now I can play.

It was reassuring to find that this version was in many ways similar to the old Elements 3 I was using before so it wasn't completely new territory. But there are many new features and lots of help to use them so I can see I will find this fun and perhaps not too frustrating.

I've played with some of the features using doodles from last November ... and am posting some embryonic results.

First of all with the Orton effect applied (among, I suspect, several others) ...



and then with the stacking effect after removing the colour and adding brush lines ...


The trouble is, I always tend to jump into new things with great enthusiasm and when I look back over what I've done this afternoon, I can't remember which features I used to get which effect. If I've learnt one thing then, it's to be more selective in the tools I use and to keep track of what I do!


12 comments:

  1. I found with the printmaking that printing out thumbprint pix of different stages and writing up how I got there, and what I thought of them was a great help. Somehow the stopping to think and write was reinforcing on one level, and then having the notes there to consult later provides another level of help.

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    1. Thanks, Olga, that's very useful advice. I do need to be more organised and that would be a great way to do it. It might stop me rushing enthusiastically onwards so that I miss useful stuff. My daughter has a book I might borrow too ...

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  2. These are wonderful. If you're saving the final image as a psd file, you should have all the details of tweaks right in the file, in the layers section on the lower right.

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    1. Great, Connie, and thank you. I have saved the images as psd files (as well as the jpegs for uploading to my blog) so I now know to look for the details in the file - something I'd not realised.

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  3. How exciting! Clearly you are going to have a lot of fun with this new version! Can't wait to see what else you produce....and what great inspiration...

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    1. It is exciting. I love new 'toys' and find them most inspiring so maybe I'll manage a bit more playing this evening or tomorrow ... Will post anything interesting.

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  4. It's always so much fun to explore new tools and techniques. Happy playing!

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    1. It is indeed fun - and there are so many tools and techniques out there to try ... aren't we lucky?!

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  5. Interesting effects. I too should make a note of things as I do them, especially when I don't save as a psd file

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    1. Yes indeed, Maggi, this reminded me that I need to be more disciplined than I am!

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  6. I like both results, they look a lot as if they had been drawn by hand. The lines are bold and full of energy. Pity you can't remember the steps you took but I'm sure that if you keep playing you will finally work it out :)

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    1. Very many thanks, Ersi Marina - quite a lot of the lines were drawn by hand, either before photographing the original which was done on paper or by using the brush tool after cropping, etc in Photoshop itself.
      I played a little more this afternoon and found some more interesting effects. This time I did write down what I did!

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