The Definition of the Tools

By: Brent Greenberg

So it's come to my attention I didn't start where I should have when I began learning about photoshop. I decided to jump right in and begin projects that I found online. Instead, I could have gone another route and learned Photoshop through the tools. Learn what each tool does and go from there. That's the direction I feel I should go now, and hopefully with the previous experience I have from my other Photoshop, this will all make more sense for my next project. So lets dive in for a quick crash course on the Photoshop tools.

In parentheses is the keyboard shortcut

Rectangle Marquee Tool (M)
Make selections on the image in a rectangular shape. Holding the shift key makes it a perfect square. Holding the alt key sets the center of the rectangle where your cursor is.

Move Tool (V)
This tool moves your pictures on the canvas

Lasso Tool (L)
Used to draw which parts of the picture you want to select. To end the selection, either click the beginning of your selection or double click the screen.

Magic Wand Tool (W)
Use this tool to select a color range, and it will select the block of color you picked.

Crop Tool (C)
When you select the image to crop and press the enter/return key it crops the image to the size of your box. Any piece of the image outside the box is deleted.

Healing Brush Tool (J)
This tool is used to repair minor scratches, specs, and stuff like that on your images. This is like the brush tool, you select your cursor size and brush over the parts of the image you want repaired. It averages the information on the image so it blends.

Brush Tool (B)
This paints on your image in whichever color you choose.

Clone Stamp Tool (S)
Similar to the healing brush tool, except this doesn't blend the image it copies the selected portion to where you want.

History Brush Tool (H)
This tool is like the brush tool, but it saves what it brushes over. Go to window>history and you can see what you painted over.

Eraser Tool (E)
The opposite of the brush tool, it erases the information selected. If you are on a layer, it makes that part transparent.

Gradient Tool (G)
This tool makes a gradiation of colors. Simple enough.

Blur Tool (R)
The blur tool makes the image blurry. Also very simple.

Dodge Tool (O)
This tool lightens whichever area you are covering. Except anything black...

Horizontal Type Tool (T)
Use this tool to add text to your images. Click a single point and begin typing or click and drag to the size of the text box you would like.

Rectangle Tool (U)
It draws a shape layer in the form of a rectangle and immediately put on the foreground of the canvas. Can also be changed to other shapes. Very difficult tool (sarcasm)

Notes Tool (N)
This tool adds notes to your image (self explanatory, I know) and is very helpful if you are forgetful and need to stop working or are sharing the image with someone else to work on.

Eyedropper Tool (I)
This changes the foreground color to whatever you are currently clicking on. Holding the alt key while you do this will change the background instead.

Hand Tool (T)
Used for moving an entire image within the window. If you are zoomed in and the image is too large for the screen, use the hand tool to navigate around it.

Zoom Tool (Z)
Last but certainly not least, this tool allows you to zoom into your image. Very simple.

With so many tools in Photoshop, at least I don't have to go and look up what each one means when I need them! And this has given me some great ideas for new projects to try! Shoutout to Photoshop Lab for their vast knowledge of Photoshop to help me create this post. Until next time!

Stenciling a Picture on Photoshop

By: Brent Greenberg

Okay so this attempt at Photoshop was so much easier. I think it helps I picked an easier project with an easy to follow tutorial from Instructables where I turned a photo into a stencil. The picture they used was a headshot, but I decided to use a half body shot of someone from the Shootout for Soldiers event in California. A military vet playing catch with his stick. It's an awesome picture (that I didn't take) but am very grateful the Shootout for Soldiers team gives me access to thousands of pictures to choose from. 

To start, when uploading the picture, I had to elongate it as I messed up the dimensions of the picture before uploading it. Then I had to posterize the image to make it look a little rougher for the stencil. This gave the image a blurry background and actually looked pretty cool on its own.

With the image, I posterized it to level 10, which gave the background that initial blur. Then after that I adjusted the threshold. The threshold is what gives the image the black and white feel but it varies depending on how much threshold. The more the threshold, the darker the image. The less the threshold the lighter the image. The tutorial suggested to set the threshold to 100, but I felt it looked better at 140.

Lastly, I had to clean up the image to make it a little neater. With this I used the blur tool (yeah I know it’s weird), but it really worked. I used the Gaussian blur and set the pixels to four. This to me made the picture look the best and gave it a more clear facial structure with the stencil.

All in all, take two at Photoshop was definitely not as bad as take one. It was much smoother this time with a great tutorial and I definitely want to use the website again. And on the plus side, I didn’t curse at the computer this time. But let’s see how comfortable I am after take three.

The Struggles with Photoshop

By: Brent Greenberg

Wow... That might have been the most stressful 2 hours of my life trying to figure out photoshop. It may be the most user-unfriendly program I have ever used. My first day was hell and it was only fitting when I got into my car to go home, Hells Bells by AC/DC came on the radio. 

My first idea to start and learn Photoshop was to do one of the best 50 tutorials on the tech blog Hongkiat creating a stencil banner. But that turned out to be a big failure because the tutorial was terrible. It gave very little instruction on what tools you needed and where to find them. It used pictures which were decent but they only gave a screenshot of the end screen. There were no arrows pointing to what you needed to click on. So essentially you had to figure most of it out on your own anyway. After about 25 minutes of being stuck on the same issue of creating an oval and making it show the background behind an image, I gave up.

Then my second idea was from Planet Photoshop where I would create a word in a given background (I chose a lacrosse field) and the word would have different designs in it. Let’s just say this one didn’t work because of the difficulty to put the designs in the image. And after about 30 minutes of struggling through that, I gave up.

And my last idea of the night was to do something productive for my job and create a graphic. I’m a press and communications intern with the non-profit Shootout for Soldiers. In this graphic, I would promote the Shootout for Soldiers event in Baltimore and thought it would be cool to make the images 3D and use shadows for effect. This is what I have so far. I added the logo and the word Baltimore

It is much easier to see on my computer than on this screenshot. This was difficult because for some reason, the move tool wouldn’t work and I probably spent about 20 minutes trying to move the word “Baltimore” from that bottom line up to under the Shootout for Soldiers logo.

Let’s just say those past two hours were the most stressful I’ve had at Mount Union and it might be because I’m used to picking up skills quickly. Whether its Microsoft Office, different social media platforms, or just some school assignment, nothing has taken this long for me to learn. Hopefully by my next post the graphic will be done and I can show it off to the public. So if you see it on Twitter before Thursday, I finished!