I have a bad tendency to overuse elipses...

I also seem to have an issue with hitting enter right after typing the topic...

My first issue with photoshop CS4, once I finally got it d/l'd...was figuring out how to find it with the mac os (I've been a PC user since I was 8...[queue elipses]). That was solved within 20 minutes...but it was now getting late. I opened up photoshop, found a random (most likely copyrighted) image on google images and just threw it open and went to town with pathing and various other tools. Hitting this pic with a bunch of junk for no other reason than I felt I needed to.

Below is described my very short first solo adventure into photoshop:

I started with the eyes of the boxer pic, because eyes are in the end the place my eyes always tend to rest themselves. They were very intense eyes, so I got rid of them and replaced them with one of the two basic fill patterns...rainbows.

I then removed one of the large red gloves that make the boxer what he is. I wanted to replace it with Jack Skellington's head, but couldn't quite figure out how to do that before I began to realize that it was already getting late.

I then rushed through the smudging process, more of just playing with it a little on the right side of the face, but the results were very subtle and not much fun to play with so I moved on.

I brightened the left side of the face with the dodge tool, as well as removing a lot of shadow from the remaining glove and a bit of shadow from the right cheek. This tool is a little more exciting because it has a visually obvious result.

I then burned the dark areas to make them darker, but it was so dark already that I could hardly notice the difference in those spots. The difference was much more pronounced in the medium tone spots I decided to burn.

And, because there was a glaring white quazi-semi circle at the bottom right of the screen. Because I hadn't used it yet and had little idea what it did, i messed around with the gradient tool and discovered its effect of completely covering my picture in black and white. I immediately undid this and applied the same thing into where the glove used to be, and figured out that I could change the gradiant colors into a ridiculous looking red. So now we have a cartoon glove next to a realistic one.

At this point, I needed to go to sleep. I knew, however, that I had yet to post a blog yet and that I really needed to get on that. So here I am.

So, I ruined a perfectly nice image all in the name of furthering my own knowledge of Photoshop. On a good note, I finally figured out how to use the pen tool correctly. I had been struggling with that throughout the class the other day and felt extremely stupid when looking at the girl next to me breeze through everything.

My only hope is that tomorrow turns out to have icy roads so classes will be cancelled and I can actually play around with photoshop a bit more.

Playing around with Photoshop for the first time...

Well...

I really planned to play with photoshop more today, but I ended up spending all day trying to buy photoshop only to realize I will have to finish the purchase on thursday due to an issue with the educational discount.

Apparently, even though I am a full time student at MCA and have been so for over a semester...the site decided to send my verification of student(hood/cy) to Mississippi State University where I was a student for 2 years but am no longer...obviously...enrolled at. I now have to get ahold of proof that I am a full time student at MCA, and not really sure what constitutes proof, so should be interesting.

After that I was making the attempt to find a trial version of CS3 so I could at least mess around with it. This failed miserably, so I ended up just getting the trial of CS4, since that is what I was being forced to buy anyways, CS3 no longer being a retail product. Oh well...things just work out that way I guess.

To the next post!

First Post...ever really

I am not a blogging type of person. I don't pay enough attention to my everyday life...nor even to the process of how I do things to have anything worthwhile to talk about. For me, trying to analyze what I do takes away whatever fun i'm having with a situation and shoves it up the crack of the nearest meth addict. That was a very non clever attempt at a pun.

Due to some issues with the school computers I actually ended up starting around 7 blogs at the same time...so there's some growing room if I ever do decide to pursue throwing my ideas on the intraweb for any random...anonymous...person to see. Though for the most part I find that unlikely.

Since we are supposed to put down a couple digital imaging sites that we think we might use, and the quality of them doesn't matter...I have chosen to put down:

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

which both seem to have a large selection of material. I figure I should be able to find just about anything I need between those two sites and just the basic Google Image section...which I love. However, were required to have 4 so...

http://photography-on-the.net/gallerydatabase/

I have no idea what this site is, but the pictures on the front page were slightly frightening.

And finally, my favorite online database of amateur art...

deviantart.com

I go to deviantart for two things...first I go to look at all the good art that makes me depressed and wish to get better. Then I look at a bunch of awful art so that I can feel better about myself. Hmm...apparently deviantart has a very bipolarizing effect on my emotions...

All of these should work as long as I don't plan on using them for commercial use, and since it will most likely be quite a while before I even make the attempt to sell art, I doubt that's overly likely.