Everybody I Shot Is Dead: You've Come A Long Way, Baby

I've been using Photoshop forever...before there was such a thing as layers. When there was no going back in its history and you a to save a new file for every step or lose it.

Until yesterday, I was still using a few versions back from the current CS4. I actually had a newer version on my computer but stuck with the older one (CS) like an old and comfy t-shirt. Silly me.

Yesterday was the first day of my Photoshop for Film & Video class using CS4. I'm taking class for several reasons...I'm less skilled in the program than I could be and I want to expand my opportunities and knowledge for film. And for those of you who read this blog because of an interest in photography and movies, I'm going to include some of the stuff I learn on a weekly basis.

Class #1 was pretty basic. There are several people in the class that have never used Photoshop so the professor - who has an abundance of passion and an equal amount of patience - went through demonstrations of the tools and filters. Grouped students were grabbing pictures off the internet to create composites practicing with the various tools she was demonstrating.

Even though it was basic, I did learn some stuff. A big one was the pen tool. Being self taught on Photoshop I never got the hang of the pen tool and avoided it like the swine flu. It gave me a little hiccup in class, but I persisted and expect to master it in the coming weeks. I also picked a couple of shortcuts. One is Command J. You can lasso something on one layer and hit Command (Apple) J it creates the lassoed bit on a new layer. I also didn't know you could resize brushes up with ']' and smaller with '['. That's going to save me a ton of time over the coming months of AFM work.

I didn't do my Photoshop exercises with internet pictures. I was using my laptop (not enough computers in the lab for everyone) and couldn't connect to the internet so I used my own pictures. And since I already knew the steps of layers and compositing photographs and couldn't decide what pics I wanted to use, I worked on two projects instead of one.

We were instructed to choose a landscape for a background picture (the sky is from my May road trip), then to add another photo (I added Mick Fleetwood, figuring that would be the end of the exercise). But then she said pick out another picture to add. My design sense said, oh no. If I'd known it was a three-piece I probably wouldn't have used Mick...I had no idea what I had that would work in this piece. The instructor used a beach shot and added a seagull in the sky, then added a dolphin in the water. Well, I found a black and white baby picture of my daughter that I had sent her a few weeks ago and thought it would be fun to have her facing off with Mick...

This was the other one I was working on. Instead of adding a third picture I used it for the filter and gradient portion of the exercise. The background is the valley in Twin Falls, ID and that's my daughter after her brain surgery. I cut her out and blended her neck with the hill. I used the 'plastic' filter on her and then did a red to green gradient over the whole picture. Click on it to see it bigger...I think it's kinda cool...