Okay. Photoshop is HANDS DOWN way more difficult than In Design. It’s been a long time since we watched the tutorials, but I can safely say I only remember how to do random things and definitely not the things I desperately need to know, like how to use layers and smart objects. I had no time to go over the tutorials again and my notes didn’t make much sense after forgetting what the abbreviations and tools stand for. This assignment was basically a learning-by-doing-experience for me. I’m not going to lie – I clicked buttons and hoped they did what I wanted them to do.
After a couple of hours I had at least placed all the images and elements into my document and was quite content with their arrangement. I like that my design looks quite cool already, although all I did was scatter photos on the canvas. I struggled for a good hour to figure out how to make the paper look whiter, because I didn’t like the creamy tone it had originally. I just couldn’t figure out how to apply any filters so I ended up selecting the whole thing and brushing over it with a transparent white. Not sure yet how I like the effect, as it also made some of the lines and the metal on the side disappear, but so far that’s what I got. Next week, I hopefully have time to go over some videos again and for the last step, I am going to figure out how to include the OU logo, what kind of text I want to use and where to place it.
This week, I was soooo tempted to cheat. If my Adobe Lightroom hadn’t been super laggy and decided to crash on me, I would have edited that sheet of paper in another program and not PS. Generally, I thought I could have completed the same assignment in InDesign in half of the time, but I knew that wasn’t the point so I closed all other programs and focused on figuring out Photoshop instead. It was hard, it wasn’t fun, but ultimately I still feel like you can’t see that looking at the final document. I actually really like the way it looks and I feel it is true to the vision I had going into this project. Now I just want to get some inspiration on how to take my mailer to the next level and along the way discover more features of PS.
