Photoshop can be a SCARY nightmare for beginners. Sometimes the tools get stuck on your cursor, sometimes you lose internet or your PC dies and it just comes back as 1 layer instead of many, and sometimes you just pick the wrong thing so you CNTRL Z too far and OOPS! You have to redo it all again. Frustrating!
One of the best lessons you can find that spans multiple design programs, will be a tutorial on layers. Adding layers can help save you a lot of “do over” time because each step you lay on top, you can throw away without hurting your original file. I found them confusing at first. There is a game called Fishworld on Facebook that uses 3 very simple ones so that you can create a little “scene” for your fish to swim by. This way, you can place a mountain behind a waterfall and then a tree in front of that for example and the tree won’t disappear if it is on layer one, the waterfall is on layer two, and the Mountain is layer 3 in the back. There are many thousands of objects and backgrounds to play with and it is a lot of fun to see what others create. There are lots of movie and tv themes, something for everyone. See how my fish, lower fog layer, and nymphs are floating in front of a scene I’ve created with layers behind them?
Today in class we began with a pizza, there were toppings to add, and a whole salad bar with toppings to pick from. Adding the layers, painting the sauce (mines pesto), “blur/cooking” the cheese and cutting out a slice were excellent tutorials designed by Professor Brock at Peninsula College. Many of the classes can be taken online from beginner to advanced levels of many design programs and also incorporate website, wordpress, and marketable skills.
A final important nugget for thought is how you choose to export to the web matters. According to Difference Between JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP Image Formats (guidingtech.com) these are the main differences and I have examples at the bottom of this page.
- JPEG is the most common format for photographs and natural scenes, but it loses quality with every save.
- PNG is a lossless format for images with transparency, text, or sharp edges, but it has a large file size.
- GIF is a format for animated images or images with limited colors, but it has a small color palette and does not support transparency.
Check out Peninsula College (pencol.edu) and start cooking your own skills, websites, blogs and portfolios now!
- JPEG is the most common format for photographs and natural scenes, but it loses quality with every save.
- PNG is a lossless format for images with transparency, text, or sharp edges, but it has a large file size.
- GIF is a format for animated images or images with limited colors, but it has a small color palette and does not support transparency.
