New Skills Benefit All

In this blog post, the skill I am talking about for me personally is Photoshop. While Photoshop can be a tedious process, it is a skill that will benefit me in the long-run. While this blog post is mainly about Photoshop and what I have learned in my early stages of using it, I encourage you to pick up a new skill or hobby. It can be a fun thing to do and is a great way to spend your extra time.

For me, my Photoshop skills are coming very slowly. I am a person who learns by having physical objects in front of me and so having it all on the computer has been frustrating and difficult for me to do. But, I am enjoying learning how to use this application because there are so many benefits in careers that can come from knowing how to use this one application.

Below is the first collage I created on Photoshop while following along with my professor. Keep reading for the process behind this piece of work.

This is a collage of three different images provided to the class as an “introduction to Photoshop” lecture. The three images are the woman, the backpack and the logo. The hardest part of this collage for me was the woman. Her hair and the hat were difficult because of the “fuzziness” of the two things. Cropping her out of her original image and getting an edge that looked natural was difficult because it is not a solid edge. Another process in Photoshop that I could not quite figure out was how to change the color of something. I have been struggling with grabbing an image and not part of the background. When you grab part of the background as well, Photoshop assumes you want to change the color of the background and not just the piece you actually wanted.

Below is the first collage I created on my own through Photoshop. The assignment was to create a collage that represented a brand without using any of the brands products or logos, while also taking your own images.

The brand I was aiming to represent in my collage was Ikea. I quickly learned there are more challenging things in the Photoshop application than a fuzzy hat. A difficult skill in this collage that I learned was how to distinguish the object from its background when the colors are very similar. The desk on the left side of this collage matched the color of the wall almost perfectly when I took the image. Because of this, Photoshop was not able to pick up parts of the desk without also grabbing parts of the background. Even when using the magnetic lasso tool on Photoshop, the application still thought the wall behind the desk was a part of the desk. Another skill I learned making this collage is that the angle you take your photos at matters more than you think. Because I took the images from where I was standing and not eye level with the desk, the images do not look natural in their place in the collage.

I have learned a lot of skills from creating my first collage on Photoshop. Because I learned so many new skills, I have decided to create a new collage with a completely different idea to submit for my first assignment. I am very excited about my new collage because it has proven to be more fun than tedious.

I will be posting my new collage in my next discussion post. Stay tuned and get excited for more of my Photoshop tips and creations!