Introduction to Photoshop

I have only briefly used Photoshop before, however, my secondary school had a slightly more basic version of Photoshop called Serif which I used fairly regularly in the past. I was able to build up some basic Photoshop skills on this which helped me when it came to actually using Photoshop in this introductory task.

We were given the image size (72x300) and then four pictures which we had to find ourselves and work with: sand dunes (which would be the background), the Eiffel Tower, a bear and an astronaut. Some of these proved to be a challenge to work with due to the shape and nature of them and so it forced us to have to work precisely and with different editing tools.

I started with the sand dunes as it was the background. I had to be sure to pick a high-resolution image in order to fit the picture size without causing detriment to the image quality if it needed to be scaled up. I downloaded the image, opened it in Photoshop and dragged it onto my blank image template, which created a new layer. In order to keep a track on all my layers, I made sure to name them so it kept things organised. The image I inserted needed to be scaled up, so I went to Edit > Transform > Scale and held shift whilst dragging it by the corner point so that it kept the aspect ratio.

I then found the image of the Eiffel Tower. Initially, I had some trouble with this as the image I picked was pasting as a very low quality image, even though the resolution was high. I couldn't resolve this problem, and after following advice from my teacher, looked for a new image. This time, it worked and pasted on with no problem and I was able to use the polygon selection tool to trace the image of the Eiffel Tower and then delete the background on it. I had to do this twice, however, as the first time I had forgotten to open my image into Photoshop first, and dragged it on straight from the Finder menu, resulting in it being pasted as a 'Smart Layer' and I was unable to delete the background.

I then looked for an image of a bear. This was slightly tricky as generally, the images I found of bears had their limbs covered by grass or they were laying/sitting in awkward positions. I eventually found one and used the polygon selection tool (with a feathering of 3 px to blend the fur into the background better) and placed it on my picture, deleting parts of the bear so it appeared to be slightly behind the sand dune.

Finally, I added the image of the astronaut. This proved to be the most difficult as the awkward shape of it meant that using the polygon selection tool took an awful long time, and twice I had to do it since the first time I accidentally double-clicked halfway through and had to start over. However, I eventually managed to cut the image out precisely and placed him in the faraway distance.

Throughout, I ensured that the images I pasted on blended into the background as best as possible by going to Image > Corrections and adjusting brightness, exposure, contrast, hue, etc. so that it looked slightly more realistic.

Overall, I wasn't entirely pleased with the outcome of my photoshop edit, I could have made it look more realistic and used better images. However, it is a starting point, and I feel that by having used Serif before may help and prove to be an advantage when it comes to editing photos later on.