Photoshop!

This week in my Communication 350 class some of us, including myself, got to know the wonderful program title Photoshop. We only learned the basics of the system but just learning those basics was enough of a start to want to learn more. During the class we talked about looking at the page you are working on as a collection of layers. This is helpful because it makes it so that you can look at the page you are working on as a bunch of different sections and move them around accordingly. Here is a website and a quick youtube video that I found helpful understand the concepts of photoshop layers.

Website: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-78e3a.html
Kind of long, but worth it because it is straight from the adobe website.

YouTube Video: This is a quick 4 minute video that gives viewers the basics when it comes to layers in photoshop.

 The second thing that we learned about this week in class was Text Effects. There are so many things that you can do with text using photoshop. For some reason I found these effects particularly difficult to do without some additional help. What I found most difficult was that there are so many different things you can do with photoshop that you often don't know where to start. Where I ended up starting was this website: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/50-great-photoshop-text-effect-tutorials-part-ii/  from this link you can basically choose what text effect you like the best, or want to use then select it. After you select it the website walks you through how to create this text effect on photoshop. 

Reading about it can be helpful but I found myself going back and fourth between pages which was somewhat annoying. Fortunately there are a lot of videos on YouTube to help with text effects which you can listen to and then do at the same time. I found this almost to be more helpful than the website. Some of the videos are longer depending on what text effect you want to use, but well worth it because these things turn out really cool. Here is a 5 minute video that gives a basic rundown on how to do a text effect.: 

Photoshop and Dreamweaver were what we started to learn this week, but we just scratched the surface. There are so many different things that can be done with these programs but this is just some of the basic information that I got from class this week. There are plenty of sources out there if you want to get more advanced with your techniques or if you just want to do different techniques in terms of what you are creating. That's all for this week.