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An Ode to Photoshop

13 Jul 2006 on Musing

What Google is to Internet Search, Photoshop has become the verb for saying digital graphic manipulation. And ooooohhh!!! I just gotta photoshop more and more. Some of my friends were asking me how do i edit and make the pic collages. While i have loads to learn, i’ll just share with you what i usually do with photos and photoshop and how i am still learning.

The Software I use Photoshop CS2 and you can also try a 30 day free trial version on the net. Like a million others out there would say, photoshop is a simply brilliant software. I always like to trace back in history to how it all started in 1989. I think it’s really nostalgic to see the Version 1 of Photoshop and as you travel through time take a look at the splashes of photoshop. Interesting eh!!

Filters This is an amazing stuff. You can turn a photo into an art piece like water painting. While doing some image processing for my internship last year i learnt the algorithms behind some of these filters. They actually manipulate pixels by Fourier and Laplace series… Sheeesh!!! So photoshop filters aren’t much different from digital signal filters.

Add-ons One of my favorite plugins is Flaming Pears. I use a lot of Melancholytron. It adds a gloomy artsy touch to any photo. And another wonderful plugin is Flood… it’ll create waves to just anything… as if there is a sinking city!!

Digital Scrapbooking There are loads of free goodies once again. Whether is it nice background papers, or clips, or ribbons - you can find them all under Digital Scrapbooking. What makes digital scrapbooking different is that these files are *.png which supports transparencies unlike *.jpeg file. Thus when you want to add a pic border, you just need to put the frame on the layer above the actual photo and not worry about erasing layers. I especially like sites like Digital Scrapbook Place and Digital Bytes. Go ahead and create a free account and download the page kits. But of course, no digital piracy… so we should not use them for commercial purpose and pass them around even to friends.

More and more tricks There are loads of sites with photoshop tutorials like here, here, here and there.

And that’s just the end of the tiny bit of stuff i know and would like to share… ok i better get back to bed and rest… otherwise mom’s gonna confiscate my laptop. I’m really sian being so sick… so suay to have fever again :neutral: