Photoshop CC Feedback I

Hello guys! I've recently taken the liberty of beginning my journey through the Photoshop illusions. Well, basically I'm going to be interested in learning how to utilize Photoshop and other Adobe programs to create digital designs of my own. So I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud CC and I started the first Adobe tutorial. Basically, I took this image:

and I turned it into this one:

Along the way, I learned different techniques I feel like I will utilize more in the future. The first skill is called Straighten, which allows me to take that first picture and adjust the picture so that the horizon is parallel to the bottom edge of the picture. This is essential for photos where you just happened to snap it at an angle. This effect can also be duplicated with a rotated crop tool, but it would require more effort. Straighten was the first nice technique that these Photoshop tutorials showed me.

Next up was the Spot Healing Brush and the Quick Selection Tool. The Spot Healing Brush allows me to remove unwanted parts of the picture and blur it with an algorithm that makes it look like the imperfection was never there. The Quick Selection allowed me to selected logical parts of a picture (like the lighthouse) so that I wouldn't have to do it manually. Together, this has allowed me to remove many imperfections from the first picture and even move islands!

Adjustment layers was a practice in how important layers are because it's very difficult to add effects to a picture and not affect the entire thing; so adjustment layers are important. I added a Black and White adjustment layer, so that the picture looks black and white. Then, I used the Quick Selection Tool and the Brush Tool to color in the the parts of the picture that I want it to look like the original picture (the lighthouse). This allowed me to achieve that desired effect above. Also, I learned there are different forms of placing external images within the project; There was Place Embedded and Place Linked. I used placed embedded because I wanted to edit that picture directly. Furthermore, The simple text tool allowed me to add that simple title underneath the logo.

Overall I enjoyed the project because it allowed me to learn some relatively obscure techniques that will prove useful to me in editing pictures. For now, I will be focusing on learning how to edit pictures, and then later on create digital art through Adobe Illustrator and then editing them through Photoshop. Editing photos using photoshop shouldn't be limited to just brushing up a picture; Photoshop is also a very versatile tool to create digital collages that can be combined to create an entirely new picture as with that pizza to woman example that I've shared earlier. Thank you for reading!