Photoshop. A word which has now been included in the dictionary, it is something which we come into contact with (in a very loose sense) almost every day. And that is as far as I’m going to take that point of this post.
Moving onto the main topic which I am going to talk about. It has really only been in the past year or so, since starting university, that I have been exposed to Photoshop in a full on way. Before that, at school, the closest thing we got to this sort of programme was CorelDRAW and its associated programmes, and it didn’t quite have the same functionality as the Adobe competitor. For personal use during this time, I called upon the services of GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Programme)(and I am aware that there may very well be some dodgy double entendres). A free downloadable programme which had all the, or nearly all of the functionality of the fully blown Photoshop. If you wanted a like for like programme, as in the same layout, there was GIMPshop. I never had the pleasure of using this one as at the time, I never really thought I would go so far as to need to use it.
I would like to point out that I do not think I am a professional at Photoshop. I am able to get by with what I know and I am able to follow tutorials I find on the internet quite easily and relatively accurately. Most of the things I do, generally are related to the product design course, generally sorting images for use on presentation boards.
Since last January, my use of Photoshop for other things rather than just for work has increased quite a lot. In fact, it has probably overtaken my University use of the programme. This has mainly been due to entering the monthly Photoshop competition on the Final Gear forums, where each month a different car is chosen and people get free reign on what they do to it. I have won a number of these competitions, and here are each of my entries for most of the competitions.
As well as the general messing around with cars and the like. One of the other main uses I have for Photoshop is tweeking my photographs slightly in order to improve them, or at least try to. One of my favourite things to do, is to apply a Lomo affect to photos which I think looks quite good. It is replicating an effect created by an old film camera and gives the resulting photographs a distinctive look.
If you would like to see more of what I do in PS, I’m sure that if you look on my Flickr, or DeviantART accounts, you will find some examples. They’re not perfect, but I did quite enjoy creating them. Working on Photoshop manages to pass the time quite well, especially when things are building up and the stress about other things is getting too much. That along with going out and taking photos helps with this.
Photo’s and competitions aside. I am able to help people reasonably well with PS, despite still learning about it myself. There are still many things I don’t know about it, but I’m sure that time will sort those out, and, eventually, I’ll be able to help others with them too, since we do learn more when we share with others.
Well, that is it for this post. I sort of feel that they are deteriorating in quality over time since I really am not having many ideas about what to write, mainly because I kind of know that my audience isn’t that large, and I do get a sense that I’m putting across that I am showing off, and I really don’t like doing that sort of thing. I shall persevere however, and on that note, I leave you with a video of me creating my entry for the December Final Gear photoshop competition. Goodnight.
Another version is available on YouTube, slightly shorter, and with different music if you would like it instead of the Vimeo version.
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