Beginning Graphic Design in Sophomore Year

Back into Graphic Design

For the past couple of weeks in Graphic Design we have been closely following tutorials in photoshop to learn the different tools and features.

In this image I removed the tag from the
 coat to make the image appear more professional.

Skills

We mainly used things like content aware fill, spot healing, and clone stamp to seamlessly take out different things from photos We did about ten different assignments  with these tools and to show them all would make my post cluttered, so I've only shown one example.

This one took a while; there was a lot to
 be done, and it needed to be done correctly.

Collage

The biggest project we did by far was the collage, where we took three images of a girl and made a senior photo-type collage of her. We had to do things like remove backgrounds, restore broken parts, resize awkward proportions, and even join two backgrounds together.

I chose a more nature oriented theme for my challenge.

Challenge

Our last assignment was a "challenge". We were given an image of a model, and were told to use what we learned in the videos to create a unique edit of the model. We could use any pictures we wanted, and were only limited by our imaginations.

Valuable information

A lot of what I learned from the video tutorials felt important, but what I found to be the most helpful was learning how to use layer masks. I knew about layer masks but I never really learned how to use them and how useful they could be. You can use them to show certain parts of a layer and hide other parts, so as you can imagine, it was very nice to finally get to use layer masks.

What would I do differently?

If I had the option to do all of this again, I would have gone back and watched more closely in the videos. Most of the time I was working with Photoshop and the video open side-by-side, so I was working along with the video. Maybe if I had watched the video first, and then went to work and referred back to the video when I needed help then I would have learned more, but that's just me.

What would I leave unchanged?

I really liked how the tutorials were set up, so there's a lot I would leave the same. Maybe have more of a choice for what we got to edit, then these tutorials would be more interesting.

Overall these tutorials were very useful, and if you are planning on going into a career involving photoshop then these skills could stick with you forever. Nothing felt like it didn't make sense or wasn't necessary.