Photoshop Exercises - Second Quarter

On Friday, October 24, 2008, you created your first Photoshop Exercise. The goal is to start getting you used to the Photoshop Toolbox and the different features the program offers to help you create great "digital art." Practice using different Filters (especially the "Artistic" Filters) and enhancing your pictures, going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast or Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (or just pressing the Command-U Keyboard Shortcut). You can also "Desaturate" a picture - convert it into a Black & White picture by going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate (or pressing Command-Shift-U).

You should re-create what you did that day (if you weren't here then just follow the instructions or ask Mrs. Feld). First, select a picture of a flower - from the iLife05 folder or from the internet. It should be a picture with good resolution (so that when you make it bigger you don't see the pixels right away).

Using the "Magnetic Lasso Tool" select your flower. Practice selecting images with this tool until you become proficient. It takes a little while to get used to it. If you make a mistake and want to go back, just press the Delete/Backspace key. Once your item (flower in this case) is selected - you should see the selection as intermittent little lines around your image - then create a layer of your flower. To create a layer you can press: Command-J. If you look at your layers palette, you see the layer of the flower, as a separate layer from the background.

Once you have the layer of the flower, you can now desaturate just the background. Select the Background Layer (it should be highlighted) and press Command-Shift-U - this will turn your background Black & White. Afterwards, you may want to add a filter to your background: go to Filters > Artistic > Poster Edges.

If you want to change the colors of your flower, select the Flower Layer and press Command-U. The Hue/Saturation window will appear. Play with the sliders and see what happens. Change the color and appearance to your liking.

Save your work as a JPEG and put it in the Server in your Digital Applications Folder. Save it as Exercise No. 1. Under your Pictures Folder you should create a folder called "Photoshop Exercises."  Try to keep your work organized and saved in the right folders.